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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 …