Jinanne Elder

8-jinanne-elderJinanne Elder has practiced family and probate law since 1974. Nan’s practice has included divorce and premarital planning, child custody, guardianships of the mentally and developmentally impaired and children, paternity, and probate litigation, as well as extensive service as a guardian ad litem. Nan pioneered representation of children in complex custody disputes and has worked extensively on issues involving child custody, children and parenting both as a trial and appellate lawyer and as the founding director of the Children and Family Law Program of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services. Her experience as an appellate attorney includes a number of ground-breaking cases involving child custody, adoption and guardianship, and she has authored several books and numerous articles, served on a variety of professional boards, commissions and committees, and spoken on and provided training addressing the interactions of families and persons with disabilities with the judicial system.

The impetus for Nan’s access to justice fellowship project at the Volunteer Lawyers Project is her prior work to address the attempts of the judicial system to resolve conflicts within families involving those, such as children and the mentally impaired, who are least able to speak for and protect themselves. Recent legislative reforms implementing the Uniform Probate Code have sought to explicitly provide for the concept of “limited guardianship” of those under mental and/or functional disability, i.e., one tailored to the specific needs of each such individual, to respect and protect the integrity and preserve the ability of those individuals so that they may continue to exercise autonomy within the limits of their functionality. While significant work on implementation has occurred, it remains a complex and difficult problem.

Nan will work with VLP to define a population group that has known full function and whose members find themselves suddenly – or slowly – losing some capacity, such as people who have suffered brain injury or are experiencing the onset of dementia, and developing a pilot mechanism for both defining the nature and extent of a guardianship to address the specific limitation and training potential guardians on the skills necessary to serve as fiduciaries for such a group.