William Bernet, Benjamin D. Garber, and Alan D. Blotcky
[Adversarial collaborations] require disagreeing scholars to (a) work together in pursuit of truth, (b) articulate their precise and empirically testable disagreements, (c) mutually agree upon rigorous and unbiased tests of their competing hypotheses, (d) commit to conditions of falsifiability or at least belief updating, and (e) pursue publication of the results regardless of their outcomes” [emphasis in original]. - Ceci, Clark, Jussim, and Williams (2026, p. 375)
AFCC has a long history of adversarial collaboration. Peter Salem (2019) said that starting in the early 2000s, “AFCC decided to emphasize opportunities to address critical issues in family law” (p. 232). This was the initiative behind several AFCC “think tanks,” which were elaborate discussions that addressed difficult and controversial topics. A more recent example of inter-agency collaboration was the “Joint Statement on Parent–Child Contact Problems” (PCCP), a shared project of AFCC and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (2022). Representatives of the organizations met several times and eventually published the “Joint Statement,” a balanced account of various factors related to PCCPs.