Law Commons^™

The Market Cannot Be Your Mother, Meghan Boone

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored). by Maxine Eichner.

Flourishing Rights, Wendy A. Bach

Michigan Law Review

There is something audacious at the heart of Clare Huntington’s Failure to Flourish. She insists that the state exists to ensure that families flourish. Not just that they survive, or not starve, or be able, somehow, to make ends meet—but that they flourish. She demands this not just for some families but, importantly, for all families. This simple, bold, and profoundly countercultural demand allows Huntington to make a tremendously convincing case that the state can begin to do precisely that. Failure to Flourish is a brave, rigorously produced, carefully researched, and politically astute book. Huntington seeks to persuade a wide …

Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Parenting is a major preoccupation in law and culture. As a result of efforts of the American women's movement over the past forty years, the legal parent is, for the first time in history, sex-neutral. Our law has abandoned restrictions on women's education, employment, and civic participation that sprang from and reinforced beliefs about the primacy of motherhood as women's best destiny. On the flip side, U.S. law now also generally rejects formal constraints on men's family roles by requiring sex-neutrality of laws regulating custody, adoption, alimony, spousal benefits, and the like. The official de-linking of presumptive parenting roles from …

Purple Haze, Clare Huntington

Michigan Law Review

It takes only a glance at the headlines every political season-with battles over issues ranging from abortion and abstinence-only education to same-sex marriage and single parenthood-to see that the culture wars have become a fixed feature of the American political landscape. The real puzzle is why these divides continue to resonate so powerfully. In Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone offer an ambitious addition to our understanding of this puzzle, illustrating pointedly why it is so hard to talk across the political divide. In a telling anecdote in the …

Strangers And Brothers: A Homily On Transracial Adoption, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The common law speaks to us in parables. Ours is Drummond v. Fulton County Department of Family and Children's Services. Just before Christmas 1973, a boy named Timmy was born to a white mother and a black father. A month later, his mother was declared unfit, and the Department of Family and Children Services placed Timmy with white foster parents - Robert and Mildred Drummond. The Drummonds were "excellent" and "loving" parents, and Timmy grew into "an extremely bright, highly verbal, outgoing 15-month baby boy." Then the Drummonds asked to adopt Timmy. The Department's reviews of the Drummonds' devotion …

Political Lawyering, One Person At A Time: The Challenge Of Legal Work Against Domestic Violence For The Impact Litigation/Client Service Debate, Peter Margulies

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The premise of this Article is that, in his assertion that client service work is political lawyering, Ralph Reed is right. Indeed, Gary Bellow made a similar point about the political content of both impact litigation and client service work in a classic article written almost twenty years ago. Of course, Reed and Bellow are hardly ideological soulmates. Reed disapproves of the political content of service work, while Bellow heartily endorses it. On that point, this Article sides with Bellow. It employs the example of domestic violence lawyering to demonstrate why Bellow and Reed are correct that client service work …

Divorce, Custody, Gender, And The Limits Of Law: On Dividing The Child, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody by Elanor E. Maccoby and Robert H. Mnookin

Religion And Child Custody, Carl E. Schneider

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Essay, I want to reflect on some problems at the intersection of religion, law, and the family. Specifically, I will explore the ways courts may consider a parent's religiously motivated behavior in making decisions about the custody of children. More precisely still, I will ask two questions. First, may a court refuse to award custody because of a parent's religiously motivated behavior in a dispute between a natural mother and a natural father? Second, when should a court agree to resolve a dispute between divorced parents over the religious upbringing of their children? These are topics of quiet …

The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

On an occasion such as this, we are called to step back from our daily work to seek what Justice Holmes called a "liberal view" of our subject. Today, I propose to do so by exploring a function of family law that I believe is basic, that underlies much of family law, that resonates with the deepest purposes of culture but that is rarely addressed expressly-namely, what I call the "channelling function." As I will soon explain at length, in the channelling function the law recruits, builds, shapes, sustains; and promotes social institutions. My exploration of this topic will have …

Legislatures And Legal Change: The Reform Of Divorce Law, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Silent Revolution: Routine Policy Making and the Transformation of Divorce Law in the United States by Herbert Jacob

The Twentieth-Century Revolution In Family Wealth Transmission, John H. Langbein

Michigan Law Review

The main purpose of this article is to sound a pair of themes about the ways in which these great changes in the nature of wealth have become associated with changes of perhaps comparable magnitude in the timing and in the character of family wealth transmission. My first theme, developed in Part II, concerns human capital. Whereas of old, wealth transmission from parents to children tended to center upon major items of patrimony such as the family farm or the family firm, today for the broad middle classes, wealth transmission centers on a radically different kind of asset: the investment …

Kitsch And Community, Kathryn Abrams

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsden, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, and Strong Democracy by Benjamin Barber, Exodus and Revolution by Michael Walzer

Moral Discourse And Family Law, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Michigan Law Review

It seems appropriate in the early stages of an experiment in legal publishing to say something about it, if only because few forms have been as resistant to innovation as the law review. The creation of a section for correspondence regarding recent articles provides a medium for conducting just the national discourse which scholarship aspires to provoke and which does occur in private conversations or letters and, occasionally, in panels at professional meetings. To talk in print about a colleague's work - to praise it, qualify it, pursue suggested or alternate lines of thought - is not only an enjoyable …

Moral Discourse And The Transformation Of American Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

Family law has undergone momentous change in recent decades. In this Article, Professor Schneider proposes that the transformation in family law can be understood as a diminution in the law's discourse in moral terms about the relations between family members and as a transfer of moral decisions from the law to the people the law once regulated. Professor Schneider identifies countertrends and limits to the changes he describes, and then investigates the reasons for the changes. He hypothesizes that four forces helped change family law and moral discourse within family law: the legal tradition of noninterference in family affairs; the …

The 'Legalization' Of The Family: Toward A Policy Of Supportive Neutrality, David L. Chambers

Articles

The word "legalization" has conflicting meanings. One, intended to sound the theme of this conference, conveys the notion of government regulation permeating some area of human activity. The other-as found, for example, in the phrase "the legalization of marijuana"-is a near opposite: the process of making legal or permissible that which. was previously forbidden, taking government out of that which it had previously controlled. The recent history of government's relationship to the family amply displays both sorts of legalization, both government's intrusion and its withdrawal, and reveals a paradoxical relation between the two-that as government frees people to live their …

The Home Front: Notes From The Family War Zone, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Home Front: Notes from the Family War Zone by Louise Armstrong

Blest Be The Tie That Binds, Joan Heifetz Hollinger

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The New Family and the New Property by Mary Ann Glendon

The Constitutional Status Of Marriage, Kinship, And Sexual Privacy -- Balancing The Individual And Social Interests, Bruce C. Hafen

Michigan Law Review

Today's lopsided competition between the individual and social interests has made the law a party to the contemporary haze that clouds our vision of what a family is or should be. In that sense, recent legal developments have contributed to the crisis Stanley Hauerwas has identified regarding American family life today - our inability to define "what kind of family should exist" and our inability to articulate ''why we should think of [the family] as our most basic moral institution."

In response to those two questions, this Article considers whether, as a constitutional matter, the courts should recognize claims by …

The Coming Curtailment Of Compulsory Child Support, David L. Chambers

Articles

Absent parents ought to contribute to the support of their minor children and states can appropriately invoke the force of law to compel them to do so. Stated so generally, even absent parents behind in their payments would probably agree. Since so many others agree as well, and since the numbers of single-parent children have mushroomed, systems of governmentally compelled support in this country have grown enormously. By the early part of the next century, if current laws remain in force and current population trends continue, most of America's children on any given day will be entitled to support from …

Family Courts, Willis B. Perkins

Michigan Law Review

A great deal has been said, but very little has been authoritatively written upon the subject of Domestic Relations Courts in this country. So far as I know, no such court has yet been successfully established embodying the jurisdiction and powers the advocates of such a court claim it should possess. I am not unaware, however, that courts under the name ef Domestic Relations Courts have been established, notably in New York City and Cincinnati, and that certain Municipal Courts, notably in Chicago, have been given jurisdiction in certain family matters, but none of these courts, as at present organized, …