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Achieving Equality Without A Constitution: Lessons From Israel For Queer Family Law, Laura T. Kessler
Achieving Equality Without A Constitution: Lessons From Israel For Queer Family Law, Laura T. Kessler
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
How might the United States reconcile conflicts between equality and religious freedom in the realm of family law? To answer this question, this chapter considers recent developments in family (personal status) law in Israel. While Israel may at first blush appear to be the last place that feminists and queer theorists should look for solutions to modern conflicts between democratic and religious values, this chapter argues that the Israeli experience has much to offer critical family scholars working to develop pluralistic legal approaches to family regulation. Israel is a country with a diverse population and unique political and legal context …
Family Law By The Numbers: The Story That Casebooks Tell, Laura T. Kessler
Family Law By The Numbers: The Story That Casebooks Tell, Laura T. Kessler
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
This Article presents the findings of a content analysis of 86 family law casebooks published in the United States from 1960 to 2019. Its purpose is to critically assess the discipline of family law with the aim of informing our understandings of family law’s history and exposing its ideological foundations and consequences. Although legal thinkers have written several intellectual histories of family law, this is the first quantitative look at the field.
The study finds that coverage of marriage and divorce in family law casebooks has decreased by almost half relative to other topics since the 1960s. In contrast, pages …
Reynolds V. United States, Rewritten, Laura T. Kessler
Reynolds V. United States, Rewritten, Laura T. Kessler
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
In Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, upheld the federal Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act outlawing polygamy in the federal territories and providing criminal penalties for it. This is a re-writing of that opinion, presented in the form of a dissent, available in Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020). Unlike the Court’s opinion, this dissent concludes that religious practice, as well as belief, is protected by the First Amendment. It therefore holds that a religious duty to engage in an unlawful practice may be a …