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Full-Text Articles in Law
What Is Nonmarriage?, Katharine Baker
What Is Nonmarriage?, Katharine Baker
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As rates of cohabitation rise, and marriage becomes a status reserved almost exclusively for socio-economic elites, the scholarly calls for family law to recognize more nonmarital families grow stronger by the day. This Article unpacks contemporary proposals to recognize more nonmarital families and juxtaposes those proposals with family law’s contemporary marital regime. Family law’s status-based system provides a mostly simple and efficient means of distributing resources at the end of a marriage by imposing a formulaic, but distinctly communitarian, non-market-based approach to obligation, entitlement, and value. In full, the Article defends family law’s status-based system for what it does well, …
The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine Baker
The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine Baker
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Most contemporary family law scholarship assumes that propriety of a DNA default for establishing parenthood - a presumption that, in the absence of marriage, whoever had the sex with the mother that resulted in the child should be the father of the child. This article problematizes that DNA default. It demonstrates how the DNA default necessarily magnifies the legal and social importance of sex, discounts the legal significance of women's reproductive labor, and marginalizes all children living outside the binary, heteronormative norm that a genetic regime necessarily edifies. When scrutinized, the DNA default looks just as moralistic and exclusionary as …