Law Commons^™

A Defense Of Paid Family Leave, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

The problem of combining work and family life is perhaps the central challenge for the contemporary American family. In this Article, I evaluate and defend government provision of paid family leave, a benefit that would allow workers to take compensated time off from work for purposes of family caregiving.

A legal intervention in the arena of work-family accommodation can only build on some prior normative understanding of the family, and embedded within that, contested value choices about women's identities and entitlements in workplace, family, and society. I am not the first legal scholar to advocate paid family leave of some …

Child Custody, Religious Practices, And Conscience, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This article asks to what extent considerations relating to religion should figure in custody disputes. One inquiry is whether the kind of religious life that a parent plans for his or her child should figure in the decision whether to grant custody to that parent. The article focuses on a religious life that involves very substantial deprivation no after-school activities, no television, no pets, no reading except schoolwork and the Bible-from an ordinary secular perspective. A second inquiry is whether one parent of a divorced couple should be able to prevent the other parent from exposing a child to various …