Professor Elrod Reappointed to U.S. Advisory Committee on Private International Law

Photograph: Professor Linda ElrodProfessor Linda D. Elrod, '72, Washburn Law’s Richard S. Righter Distinguished Professor of Law, has been reappointed to serve on the United States Department of State's Legal Adviser's Advisory Committee on Private International Law (ACPIL). 

"One of the most pressing family law issues for the State Department is getting Congress to pass the implementing legislation so the United States can ratify the 2007 Hague Convention on the International Enforcement  of Child Support and other Forms of Family Maintenance," Elrod stated. "This treaty will make it easier to collect support for our citizens when the obligor lives in a foreign country."

ACPIL’s purpose is to serve the Department in a solely advisory capacity with respect to significant issues of private international law arising or likely to arise in the work of international organizations of which the United States is a Member State, or in international bodies in whose work the United States has an interest, or in the foreign relations of the United States. Members of private sector organizations; bar associations; national legal organizations; and federal and state governmental and judicial interests concerned with private international law matters serve on the ACPIL.

Elrod also serves on the Council for the American Bar Association Family Law Section. She is director of Washburn Law’s Children and Family Law Center and has been teaching family law for 39 years.

In 2013, the Uniform Law Commission asked her to be the reporter for a new Family Law Arbitration Act. She previously was the reporter for the Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act (UCAPA) which has now been enacted in 12 states. She sat on the Joint Editorial Board on Family Law for the Uniform Law Commission from 1998 to 2013.

Elrod’s expertise on child and family law has taken her around the world. She has been a speaker at the 5th World Congress on Children and Families in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2010 and at the 6th World Congress in Sydney, Australia in 2013. She is active in the International Society of Family Law; has taught on summer programs in Europe eight times; and was an invited speaker at the Kopaonik School of Natural Law in Serbia in 2011.