My question now is, should I expect a WAR within an EAR to have a child CL?
Yes.
I think what I may be seeing is, there is just one CL for an EAR.
You can check the jmx-console for classloaders. Check if there are two or just one for your deployment.
I'm wondering if my local WEB-INF/classes/log4j.xml is not being found because the WAR does not have it's own CL, but shares it with the EAR.
Where are your log4j classes? Does war have it's own copy of log4j?
Here is my war's jboss-classloading.xml, I am even being explicit about searching the WAR domain first
This config is already done by default for .war deployments.
See WarClassLoaderDeployer class in JBossAS.