Law Commons^™

The Puzzle Of Family Law Pluralism, Erez Aloni

All Faculty Publications

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 …

Purpose Vs. Power: Parens Patriae And Agency Self-Interest, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of human service agencies to serve vulnerable populations such as abused and neglected children derives from the common law doctrine of parens patriae, embodying the inherent role of the state as parent of the country. However, along with this foundational purpose, the parens patriae doctrine also provides power that is illusive to public knowledge and oversight. To maintain their cloak of power, the very agencies created to fulfill the parens patriae obligations — to protect the rights of children — have systematically battled the children’s efforts to claim those rights as their own. Also, the agencies have now …

American Family Law: History -- Whostory, Ana M. Novoa

Faculty Articles

Family law should be rooted in preserving and protecting intimate relationships; instead, it is rooted in preserving those domestic systems that created or expanded the economic empire of the "Founding Fathers," the white males of the colonial northeast. This northeastern colonial perspective continues to underpin most of the basic assumptions in family law. Concurrently, with the increased privatization of the cooperative virtues, Americans have developed an excessive preoccupation with self and a cult of consumerism.

Consumerism has driven American society toward increased individualism and narcissism. A by-product of the increased individual-consumer culture is the mistaken belief that our personal values …

The Removal Of Adam's Rib: The Creation And Polarization Of Male And Female Virtues, Ana M. Novoa

Faculty Articles

Soft virtues, normally associated with women, have been deemed to have no legal, market or public value, and this has caused problems within American society. The devaluation of cooperative and nurturing virtues, coupled with the dangerous myth of independence and self-reliance, and general acceptance of consumption as a positive attribute, have had a profound effect on American society as a whole and, in particular, on general views on the care of children and other dependent members of our society. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the composition and character of the family were very different because the family was not a …