The U.S. Children’s Bureau was a federal investigative agency created by Congress in 1912, as an outgrowth of national campaigns to reduce infant mortality and child labor and of baby-farming and black-market adoption scandals. It advocated standards in placement and state adoption laws, and it held the first conferences on child welfare. Today the organization […]

Elizabeth Samuels is a professor at the University Baltimore School of Law. Her areas of expertise include child and family law/adoption, constitutional law and Supreme Court seminar.

Barbara Yngvesson is a professor emerita of anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where she is also the former Dean of the School of Social Science and founding director of the interdisciplinary Program in Culture, Brain, and Development. Her interests include the cultural study of law, family and kinship; theories of identity and belonging; […]

Stephen Presser is Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History at Northwestern School of Law. His areas of expertise include business associations and legal history.

Joan Heifetz Hollinger is the John and Elizabeth Boalt Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. She is a scholar of adoption law, including the Indian Child Welfare Act, and of psychosocial aspects of adoptive family relationships. She is an advocate of adoption law reform and has served on […]

Naomi R. Cahn is a professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., where she has taught family law, trusts and estates. She is an expert on adoption law. She co-edited (with Joan Heifetz Hollinger) Families by Law: An Adoption Reader.

Elizabeth Bartholet is a law professor at Harvard University and faculty director of the school’s Child Advocacy Program, which she founded in the fall of 2004. She has taught civil rights and family law, specializing in child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology. She wrote Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting.

The UCC Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns advocates for full inclusion of LGBT people in church and society. Search a list of “open and affirming” congregations organized by state.

Information on the UCC’s stands regarding homosexuality.