Family Law
Time and Punishment
The legal system’s ability to control people’s time is a form of dominion that exacerbates the structural disadvantages that marginalized families already face. Constriction, stretching, and indeterminacy are important aspects of temporal marginalization in the family regulation system. Considering the experience of time is one step towards understanding its impacts.
Facilitating Future Workforce Participation for Stay-at-Home Parents: Mitigating the Career Costs of Parenthood
Current policies help parents stay in the workforce after having children. But what about the quarter of American mothers who choose to become stay-at-home moms, then later face employment obstacles? This Essay proposes expanding worker opportunity tax credits and Title VII to help stay-at-home parents return to work when ready.
Hayek Goes to Family Court
Applying Hayek’s theory of law and liberty to contemporary American family law, this Essay concludes that family-law scholars—especially those undertaking distributional analyses—would benefit from greater attention to the Hayekian values of predictability, adaptation, and equal application.
In Loco Reipublicae
This Article proposes a new framework for children in constitutional law that recognizes children’s rights as developing citizens and parents’ duties to safeguard those rights. An examination of children’s First Amendment right to access ideas illustrates parents’ duty to ensure children are exposed to information critical to their democratic citizenship.
Family Law for the One-Hundred-Year Life
Family law is failing older adults, offering neither the family forms older adults want nor the support of family care older adults need. Racial and economic inequities, accumulated across lifetimes, exacerbate these problems. This Article responds to these challenges by proposing family law reform for our aging society.
Racial Myopia in [Family] Law
Racial myopia in law is a complex phenomenon that centers white identity as the standard. A critique of the Article Family Law for the One-Hundred-Year Life, this Response presents a concrete framework and clarion call for all scholars to address legal issues in a racially inclusive way.
Radical Early Defense Against Family Policing
What possibilities arise when law-school clinics experiment in challenging a well-oiled system at its untouched margins, within a collective, community-based movement whose lodestar is abolition? This Essay examines this question in the family-policing context and articulates a radical vision of family defense in subjudicial venues.
Weaponizing Fear
Governor Abbott’s directive that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services should investigate so-called “abusive sex change procedures” fits within a broader project of weaponizing fear to control marginalized families. The issue is not primarily the directive’s misuse of the family regulation system but the system itself.
Chosen Family, Care, and the Workplace
Although federal law offers, at best, unpaid time off work to care for family members with medical needs, recently enacted state laws guarantee paid leave. This Essay argues the laws are groundbreaking in their inclusion of nonmarital partners, extended family, and other chosen family, and it proposes strategies for effective implementation.
Religious Exemptions and the Family
This Essay highlights the threat claims for religious exemptions to antidiscrimination laws pose to the diverse family arrangements that now populate our society. It argues we should not abide efforts to thwart, undermine, and ultimately overturn advances in equality norms in the family based on religious belief.
Ridding the Family-Law Canon of the Relics of Coverture: The Due Process Right to Alternative Fee Arrangements in Divorce
The prohibition on contingency fee arrangements with divorce lawyers is a relic of the coverture regime. It cannot withstand Due Process scrutiny because the supposed governmental interests it purports to advance—burdening access to the divorce process for economically vulnerable persons—are not legitimate governmental interests under modern constitutional jurisprudence.
The Case for Creative Pluralism in Adoption and Foster Care
Religious and secular beliefs about marriage and sexuality are often in tension. Partisans on both sides commonly insist that public policy entirely reflect their views, which leads to perpetual conflict. This Essay advocates for pluralistic solutions to such conflicts, using an example from the context of adoption and foster care.
While They Waited: Pre-Obergefell Lives and the Law of Nonmarriage
This Essay looks at married same-sex couples who, pre-Obergefell, spent time in nonmarital relationships while awaiting the right to wed. In discussing how courts now count those pre-equality years toward the length of couples’ relationships—a decision relevant to adjudicating many benefits—the Essay illuminates weaknesses in current nonmarriage law.
Zoned Out: How Zoning Law Undermines Family Law’s Functional Turn
A fatal conflict in the legal definition of family lurks at the intersection of family law and zoning law. Family law has increasingly embraced “functional families,” those whose bonds can be traced to cohabitation, while zoning law has narrowed to restrict residency to individuals related by blood, marriage, or adoption.
In the Shadow of Child Protective Services: Noncitizen Parents and the Child-Welfare System
The noncitizen parent exists between two often-conflicting legal identities: that of an immigrant and that of a parent. This Essay argues that state child services should strive to mitigate the tension between these identities and take an active role in shielding these parents from immigration consequences of family-law proceedings.
The (Not So) New Law of the Child
Martin Guggenheim responds to Dailey & Rosenbury’s New Law of the Child, defending the existing "authorities framework" and arguing that any new framework for children’s rights must focus on questions of structural inequality.
Top-Down or from the Ground?: A Practical Perspective on Reforming the Field of Children and the Law
Cheryl Bratt responds to Dailey & Rosenbury’s New Law of the Child, arguing for a youth-led movement to reform how children are understood and valued in American culture.
The New Law of the Child
This Article sets forth a new paradigm for describing, understanding, and shaping children’s relationship to law. The authors show how the existing legal regime focuses narrowly on state and parental control over children, and they propose a new framework that promotes a broader range of children’s present and future interests.
Nurturing Parenthood Through the UPA (2017)
This Response to Douglas Nejaime’s The Nature of Parenthood shows how the recently approved revisions to the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA)—which expand the ways in which a nonbiological parent may establish her or his parentage—address many of the critical gaps in parentage law identified by NeJaime.