Law Commons^™

Rich Dad, Gay Dad: The Wealth Traps Of Gay Fatherhood, Aloni Erez

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While legal and societal progress has enabled gay fathers to form families, there remains a critical blind spot in our understanding of their financial wellbeing. Specifically, there are indications that a wealth gap may exist among gay father households. This article introduces a novel taxonomy of the mechanisms that likely contribute to a wealth gap for these households, including surrogacy and adoption costs, legal recognition expenses, parental leave policies, discrimination in housing and borrowing, and limited support from families of origin. These obstacles reflect the structural features and prejudices that disproportionately affect households led by non-heterosexual fathers. The article highlights …

Compulsory Conjugality, Erez Aloni

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What happens when the state changes the default rules that govern financial obligations between unmarried partners from opt in to opt out? Most states have an opt-in rule: unmarried partners do not take on financial obligations of one another unless they agree to do so with a contract. Nevertheless, advocates argue that an opt-out system puts the burden in the right place: unmarried couples who want to avoid default obligations should bear the burden of making contracts. A scholarly debate over the opt-in/opt-out model has raged for twenty years, but the issue is now coming to a head. Yet no …

First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Baby, Then Comes What Exactly?, Erez Aloni

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Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage is an event of international importance concerning the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals and partners; further, it constitutes an opportunity to examine the state of LGBTQ+ equality in Taiwan and elsewhere. To this end, through theoretical and comparative lenses, this Article asks what equality for LGBTQ+ means and what comes after marriage. It offers perspectives on the past, present, and future of the intersection of same-sex marriage and equality. Looking at the path to same-sex marriage in Taiwan, the Article argues that the Taiwanese Constitutional Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage maintained a line between domesticated liberty …

The Marital Wealth Gap, Erez Aloni

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Married couples are wealthier than people in all other family structures. The top 10% of wealth holders are, in great proportion, married. Even among the wealthiest households, married couples hold significantly more wealth than others. The Article identifies this phenomenon as the “Marital Wealth Gap,” and critiques the role of diverse legal mechanisms in creating and maintaining it. Marriage also contributes to the concentration of wealth because marriage patterns are increasingly assortative: wealth marries wealth. The law entrenches or even exacerbates these class-based marriage patterns by erecting structural barriers that hinder people from meeting across economic strata.

How can the …

The Puzzle Of Family Law Pluralism, Erez Aloni

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Family law is succumbing to pluralism. Scholars have celebrated this trend as a desirable outcome of the struggle for marriage equality. And a pluralistic family law seems to offer distinct benefits: more regimes than just marriage, and greater room for choice within each regime (manifest by more types of legally enforceable intrafamilial contracts). This Article exposes counterintuitive facts that lead to a surprising conclusion: the legal changes that scholars tout as increasing pluralism eviscerate the substance of the choices families are permitted to make.

The policies that appear to extend choice within each regime, in fact, mask what I call …

Sans Foi, Ni Loi. Appearances Of Conjugality And Lawless Love, Régine Tremblay

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This chapter deals with paradigm shifts in the legal regulation of adult intimate relationships. It includes the shifts from a unique conjugality to the multiplication of conjugalities, from marriage until death do us part to multiple subsequent unions, and from mimicking marriage by necessity to mimicking marriage by choice. Such changes open the floor for questions about the relevance of regulating adult intimate relationships today, or at the very least, about the compulsion to conceive of this kind of relationship as the cornerstone of Canadian family law. As such, it questions shifts in latent elements of the regulation of conjugality …

Surrogates In Quebec: The Good, The Bad And The Foreigner, Régine Tremblay

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The regime for the formal establishment of parent-child relationships in the province of Quebec was substantially modified in 2002 in order to achieve equality. Reforms to filiation – the legal bond connecting child and mother or child and father – in Quebec provided means for same-sex couples to adopt, for lesbian couples to conceive using donated sperm and clarified the filiation of children born of assisted procreation. This ‘successful’ reform in terms of equality left untouched an existing rule justified by women’s equality, namely, what the civil law calls the absolute nullity of surrogacy agreements. Surrogacy raises questions about what …

Translating Religious Principles Into German Law: Boundaries And Contradictions, Pascale Fournier, Régine Tremblay

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First we present the basic rules of Islamic and Jewish law and the German state law that regulates them. Next we contend that the boundaries for shaping and applying religious norms are blurry. We argue that the conflicting outcomes might be explained by boundless discretion and informality in the religious adjudication process, but that this structure is not foreign to so-called secular family law. Thus, if the project of recognizing religious principles when it comes to family law is to be maintained, it must take stock of the conceptual and practical conflicts that inhere to the sphere of family law, …

Deprivative Recognition, Erez Aloni

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Family law is now replete with proposals advocating for the legal recognition of nonmarital relationships: those between friends, relatives, unmarried intimate partners, and the like. The presumption underlying these proposals is that legal recognition is financially beneficial to partners. This assumption is sometimes wrong: Legal recognition of relationships can be harmful to unmarried partners — a reality whose impact on policy concerning regulation of nonmarital unions has not been explored. As this Article shows, a significant number of people benefit financially from nonrecognition of their relationships. While in most cases the state turns a blind eye to this financial gain, …

Registering Relationships, Erez Aloni

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Despite the dramatic changes in family structure in the past decades — including the unprecedented and skyrocketing number of families who live in non-marital arrangements — marriage and marriage-mimic institutions remain the only legal options for the recognition of relationships. This regulatory regime leaves millions of Americans without the means to establish and protect relationship rights. The article suggests that the legal issues arising from non-marital relationships would be best addressed if more options for legal recognition of such relationships were offered. Accordingly, this article presents the primary principles of a registration-based marriage alternative, founded on contract: “registered contractual relationships.” …

Conscientious Objection To Creating Same-Sex Unions: An International Analysis, Bruce Macdougall, Elsje Bonthuys, Kenneth Mck. Norrie, Marjolein Van Den Brink

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In jurisdictions that recognize same-sex marriages and unions, the question arises as to the extent to which civic officials who normally preside at such unions can refuse such participation for religious reasons. This paper examines this issue in the context of four jurisdictions: Scotland, Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa. What is striking is how different is the process of reaching a resolution in each jurisdiction, though the actual result might be the same. This difference arises because of the jurisdiction-specific reasons why same-sex marriages and unions are recognized, how they are recognized, the status of the officers who preside …

Mère, Régine Tremblay

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Qu'est-ce qu'une mère en droit? Cette entrée encyclopédique explore de manière critique et transsystémique la notion de mère en droit, à la lumière des deux grandes traditions juridiques canadiennes.

Cloning And The Lgbti Family: Cautious Optimism, Erez Aloni

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While fertile, opposite-sex couples can have children who carry a mix of their genes without involving third parties in the reproductive process, this option is not available to the majority of the LGBTI community. If this were simply a biological fact, it would not raise any equal protection or other constitutional issues. However, emerging technologies in the field of reproductive cloning may offer the LGBTI community the chance to have genetically related children - possibly even with a mix of both partners’ genes. As such, bans on federally funding research that would help to refine and ensure the safety and …

Incrementalism, Civil Unions, And The Possibility Of Predicting Legal Recognition Of Same-Sex Marriage, Erez Aloni

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Scholars who have examined the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships in European countries have concluded that the path to the legalization of same-sex marriage follows an incremental process involving specific stages. They suggest that it is possible to predict, based on certain visible social and legal processes or assessable parameters, which U.S. states will be the next to recognize same-sex marriage. These scholars argue that such small cumulative legal changes at the state level constitute the best means of legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States, and that civil unions are a necessary step in this process. This article shows …

Le Droit Myope, Régine Tremblay

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Cet essai présente la violence conjugale comme un enjeu de droit privé et de droit public, comme une problématique qui se situe au confluent de ces deux catégories considérées comme mutuellement exclusives. L'évolution de la perception de I'homosexualité en droit public a transformé notre idée du couple en droit privé. Ceci remet en question notre façon de penser le couple, les individus qui le composent et la violence qui s'y produit.

Parental Separation And The Child Custody Decision: Toward A Reconception, David G. Duff, Roxanne Mykitiuk

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Contemporary debates regarding the appropriate way to resolve custody and access disputes reflect deeply rooted conceptions of both the family and the proper relationship between the family and the state. The prevailing "best interests of the child" test and judicial presumptions favouring sole custody embody a traditional definition of the family and a communitarian image of familial relationships.Conversely, current joint custody legislation adopts a liberal-contractual paradigm, in which the family is viewed as a joint partnership and children are conceived as assets to be equally divided upon termination ofthe spousal relationship. The authors reject both notions of the family and …

The Supreme Court And The New Family Law: Working Through The Pelech Trilogy, David G. Duff

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The trilogy of family law decisions, released by the Supreme Court of Canada on 4 June 1987, represents perhaps the most important statement of the past two decades by Canada's highest court on this rapidly changing area of law. Although decided under the repealed Divorce Act of 1968, judicial analyses of support and domestic contracts are likely to be little altered under the 1985 Act. Furthermore, that these cases reveal the Court's underlying philosophy of the new family law as a whole suggests a significance that transcends specific amendments to the Act. With respect to the outcome of each individual …