Law Commons^™

Fireside Chat With Chief Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton And Professor Nikolas Bowie: A Discussion About The Relevance And Impact Of State Constitutional Law, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

7th Annual Stonewall Lecture Series - The Battle For Pride: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow 2023, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

6th Annual Stonewall Lecture 2-2-2023, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (January 2023): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Chosen Family, Care, And The Workplace, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Employees often request time off work to care for the medical needs of loved ones who are part of their extended or chosen family. Until recently, most workers would not have had any legal right to take such leave. A rapidly growing number of state laws, however, not only guarantee paid time off for family health needs, but also adopt innovative and expansive definitions of eligible family.

Several provide leave to care for intimate partners without requiring legal formalization of the relationship. Some go further to include any individual who has a relationship with the employee that is “like” or …

Hegemonic Marriage: The Collision Of 'Transformative' Same-Sex Marriage With Reactionary Tax Law, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Before there was a culture war in the United States over same-sex marriage, there was a battle between opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage within the LGBTQ+ community. Some opposed same-sex marriage because of the long patriarchal history of marriage and the more consequential need to bridge the economic and privilege gap between the married and the unmarried. Others, in contrast, saw marriage as a civil rights issue and lauded the transformative potential of same-sex marriage, contending that it could upset the patriarchal nature of marriage and help to refashion marriage into something new and better.

This Article looks back …

What Is Nonmarriage?, Katharine Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

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, …

Law School News: The Honorable Margaret H. Marshall: Doctor Of Laws, Honoris Causa 05-10-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The E-Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (June 2019), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

In The Right Direction, Family Diversity In The Inter-American System Of Human Rights, Macarena Sáez

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article argues that the Inter-American System of Human Rights has contributed to a family system that embraces gender equality and non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming families. It argues that the system had, from its inception, an expansive idea of the family that included associations outside marriage. This was the basis for a robust development of the concepts of equality and non-discrimination by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Although the IACtHR has only decided a handful of cases related to the non-heterosexual family, its rich case law on equality and the right to …

Law School News: 'Hate And Bigotry Have No Place In America' April 18, 2019, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

2nd Annual Stonewall Lecture 04-16-2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Gender In The Context Of Same-Sex Divorce And Relationship Dissolution, Suzanne A. Kim, Edward Stein

Articles

This article identifies ways that judges, lawyers, researchers, and policy makers may attend to the role of gender and gender dynamics facing same-sex couples upon divorce or other relationship dissolution. When same-sex couples marry, the legal system and society at large may project conceptions of gender onto same-sex couples, often in a manner that conflicts with couples’ intentions and practices. Gender and gender dynamics may affect the bases for dissolution, the financial aspects of dissolution, and the determination of child custody. The article also suggests directions for future research on the impact of gender on the dissolution of same-sex relationships.

Newsroom: 'You Can't Help Being In Awe' 1-30-2018, Michael M. Bowden, Edward Fitzpatrick

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Formative Projects, Formative Influences: Of Martha Albertson Fineman And Feminist, Liberal, And Vulnerable Subjects, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, contributed to a symposium on the work of Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, argues that Fineman is a truly generative and transformative scholar, spurring people to think in new ways about key terms like “dependency,” “autonomy,” and “vulnerability” and about basic institutions such as the family and the state. It also recounts Fineman’s role in creating spaces for the generation of scholarship by others. The essay traces critical shifts in Fineman’s scholarly concerns, such as from a theory of dependency to vulnerability theory and from a gender lens to a skepticism about a focus on identities and discrimination. In …

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage …

The Law Of Nonmarriage, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The meaning of marriage, and how it regulates intimate relationships, has been at the forefront of recent scholarly and public debates. Yet despite the attention paid to marriage—especially in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges—a record number of people are not marrying. Legal scholarship has mostly neglected how the law regulates these nonmarital relationships. This Article begins to fill the gap. It does so by examining how courts distribute property at the end of a relationship that was nonmarital at some point. This inquiry provides a descriptive account to a poorly understood and largely under-theorized area of the law. …

Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski

Anthropology

Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future …

Marriage Is On The Decline And Cohabitation Is On The Rise: At What Point, If Ever, Should Unmarried Partners Acquire Marital Rights?, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

This article draws attention to the cultural shift in the formation of families that has been and is taking place in this country: Marriage is on the decline and cohabitation is on the rise. Part II documents this cultural shift by using recent government data to trace the decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 9.71%, but the husband-and-wife households only grew by 3.7%, while the unmarried-couple households grew by 41.4%. Because of the Supreme Court's decidion in Obergefell v. Hodges, marriage is now universally available to same-sex couples. Part …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Find Out What It Means To Me: The Politics Of Respect And Dignity In Sexual Orientation Anti-Discrimination, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

This accompanying article considers the state of LGBTQ equality after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Specifically, by examining this upsurge of social visibility for same-sex couples as both acceptance of sexual minorities and cultural assimilation, the article finds that the marriage cases at the Supreme Court — Obergefell and U.S. v. Windsor — shifted the framing of gay rights from the politics of respect that appeared more than a decade ago in Lawrence v. Texas toward a politics of respectability. The article traces this regression in Justice Kennedy’s own definition of dignity from Lawrence, where …

Governed By Marriage Law, Deirdre Mcgowan

Books/Book Chapters

Marriage law links the private and the political, connecting the aspirations of individuals to the regulatory ambitions of the state. Marriage has significant social and cultural importance, but the assumptions of stability and care it entails are also useful to government. As a result, marriage law has, both historically and in the present, been offered as the solution to a range of social problems. Using Ireland as a case study example, this essay focuses on the problems which marriage law reform has attempted to address and the political frameworks within which reform took place. It suggests that marriage law is …

Comments On Proposed Treasury Regulations Defining Terms Relating To Marital Status, Anthony C. Infanti, The American Bar Association

Articles

These comments respond to proposed Treasury Regulations defining terms relating to marital status in the Internal Revenue Code following the Supreme Court's decision in the Windsor and Obergefell cases. The comments applaud the Internal Revenue Service for reading gendered terms relating to marital status in a gender-neutral fashion. For a number of reasons, however, the comments recommend that the final regulations omit the proposed rule for determining an individual’s marital status and, in its place, codify the current deference to local law in determining marital status for federal tax purposes. Most importantly, the comments further recommend that the final regulations …

Interpreting Liberty And Equality Through The Lens Of Marriage, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay, I argue that marriage, as described and prescribed in Obergefell v. Hodges, functions as a lens that distorts the principles of liberty and equality upon which the opinion is based. The Supreme Court’s language is saturated with paeans to marriage, to the degree that the opinion seems to suggest that the moral worthiness of same-sex couples who wish to marry provides the ultimate justification for recognizing a constitutional right. The conceptual fulcrum in this analysis is dignity, which other courts have interpreted as an intrinsic human right that extends to a pluralism of family forms, but …

With Marriage On The Decline And Cohabitation On The Rise, What About Marital Rights For Unmarried Partners?, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

This article draws attention to a cultural shift in the formation of families that has been and is taking place in this country and in the developed world. Part I uses recent government data to trace the decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 9.71 %, but the husband and wife households only grew by 3.7%, while the unmarried couple households grew by 41.4%. A counter-intuitive finding is that the early 21st century data show little correlation between the marriage rate and economic conditions. Because of the …

Marital Contracting In A Post-Windsor World, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"I Now Pronounce You Husband And Wives": The Case For Polygamous Marriage After United States V. Windsor And Burwell V. Hobby Lobby Stores, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to question the continuing validity of Reynolds in light of subsequent United States Supreme Court deci- sions, including-most recently-UnitedStates v. Windsor and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Based upon these subsequent Supreme Court decisions, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, proponents of polygamous marriage now have a very strong case for validating polygamous marriages on cultural, religious, and constitutional grounds.

Identity And Form, Jessica A. Clarke

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent controversies over identity claims have prompted questions about who should qualify for affirmative action, who counts as family, who is a man or a woman, and who is entitled to the benefits of U.S. citizenship. Commentators across the political spectrum have made calls to settle these debates with evidence of official designations on birth certificates, application forms, or other records. This move toward formalities seeks to transcend the usual divide between those who believe identities should be determined based on objective biological or social standards, and those who believe identities are a matter of individual choice. Yet legal scholars …

The House Of Windsor: Accentuating The Heteronormativity In The Tax Incentives For Procreation, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, many seem to believe that the fight for marriage equality at the federal level is over and that any remaining work in this area is at the state level. Belying this conventional wisdom, this essay continues my work plumbing the gap between the promise of Windsor and the reality that heteronormativity has been one of the core building blocks of our federal tax system. Eradicating embedded heteronormativity will take far more than a single court decision (or even revenue ruling); it will take years of work uncovering the subtle …

Big (Gay) Love: Has The Irs Legalized Polygamy?, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Within days in December, a federal judge in Utah made news by loosening that state’s criminal prohibition against polygamy and the Attorney General of North Dakota made news by opining that a party to a same-sex marriage could enter into a different-sex marriage in that state without first obtaining a divorce or annulment. Both of these opinions raised the specter of legalized plural marriage. What discussions of these opinions missed, however, is the possibility that the IRS might already have legalized plural marriage in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in United States v. Windsor, which …