Carol S. Bruch

Carol Sophie Bruch (born June 11, 1941) is an American legal scholar and professor emerita of the law school at the University of California, Davis. A recognized authority on family marital property law, and private international law, she has influenced and worked on the drafting of family law statutes in California and other US states, and also international agreements. Her parents had emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s as Germany became increasingly inhospitable.

In 1957, at age 16, Excelling in her studies, Bruch was a member of the college honor society. Her fellow honor students at Shimer, which then enrolled approximately 200 students, included future international relations scholars Alan Dowty and Robert Keohane. Through these tests, Bruch acquired a total of 24 credits toward graduation before taking a class, at age 18. They had two children together. Bruch taught elementary school for a time in Madagascar, when her husband was working there. She has credited the experiences of both married and single parenthood with informing her life's work in family law. In 1975, Bruch prepared a casebook for the study of child law entitled Cases and Materials on Children and the Law, which she revised in 1976. The first of these was Marvin v. Marvin, which laid the groundwork for modern California non-marital cohabitation law; an expanded version of this has been frequently reprinted. The second was In re Marriage of Burgess, a 1996 case that established key precedents on child custody law in cases of parental relocation. The court cited and adopted elements of her reasoning in both cases. Bruch was given the position of "Research Professor of Law" in 2001, which she continues to hold as of 2012.

Bruch's writings, and those of other critics of PAS, have received considerable pushback from defenders of PAS, with claims including that Bruch and other critics misunderstood the theory itself, misrepresented the theory's practical application, failed to account for the full range of research findings, or unfairly disparaged Gardner himself. The doubts cast on PAS by Bruch's work and others have however proven influential, with the theory receiving an increasingly skeptical treatment by the courts and being rejected for inclusion in the DSM-5. A 2009 survey of practitioners found that few considered PAS to be admissible as evidence. PAS remains the subject of lively legal and scholarly dispute, with Bruch's paper still frequently cited.

Honors and public service In 1989, Bruch served as a member of the U.S. government's delegation to an Organization of American States diplomatic session that drafted Inter-American Conventions.

Bruch was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Basel in 2000, in recognition of her scholarship and activism on behalf of children.