Law Commons^™

Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage And Parental Rights In The Age Of Equality, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

The twentieth-century equality revolution established the principle of sex neutrality in the law of marriage and divorce and eased the most severe legal disabilities traditionally imposed upon nonmarital children. Formal equality under the law eluded nonmarital parents, however. Although unwed fathers won unprecedented legal rights and recognition in a series of Supreme Court cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to achieve constitutional parity with mothers or with married and divorced fathers. This Article excavates nonmarital fathers’ quest for equal rights, until now a mere footnote in the history of constitutional equality law.

Unmarried fathers lacked a social …

Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite a transformative half century of social change, marital status still matters. The marriage equality movement has drawn attention to the many benefits conferred in law by marriage at a time when the “marriage gap” between affluent and poor Americans widens and rates of nonmarital childbearing soar. This Essay explores the contested history of marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—through the lens of the “illegitimacy” cases of the 1960s and 1970s. Often remembered as a triumph for nonmarital families, these decisions defined the constitutional harm of illegitimacy classifications as the unjust punishment of innocent children for the “sins” of their …

What Place For Family Privacy?, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

This nuclear unit is thought to be in "crisis" because of the tendency of many marriages to dissemble and dissolve. Some people claim that society is also in a state of crisis as a result of marital instability. Many are concerned by the assembling of "deviant" and competing intimate entities claiming entitlement to the benefits and privileges previously extended to marriage." The family has become the symbolic terrain for the cultural war in which our society is increasingly mired. If one believes the family is not inherently limited to any essential or natural form, but is as contrived as any …

The Relevance Of Premarital Cohabitation To Property Division Awards In Divorce Proceedings: An Evaluation Of Present Trends And A Proposal For Legislative Reform, Barbara Freedman Wand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

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