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Full-Text Articles in Family Law
Policing "Bad" Mothers, I. Bennett Capers
Policing "Bad" Mothers, I. Bennett Capers
Faculty Scholarship
Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers — a speculative novel about a mother who abandons her child for a few hours and is required to attend a school for good mothers to regain custody — may not be a great book, but it is a good yarn, and a page turner, and thought-provoking. Thought-provoking, because to measure her fitness to be a mother, the protagonist is assigned a robot doppelganger of her child — one that is sentient, one that seems almost real, one that might even pass the Turing test, and one that she is required not only …
The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin
The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin
Fordham Law Review
This Essay reconsiders or reaffirms the Lovings’ status as civil rights icons by drawing on source material provided by the documentary The Loving Story. This nonfiction treatment of the couple and their lawsuit reveals their complexity as individuals and as a couple, the social relationships that made them desperate to live together and raise their children in Virginia, and the oppression they suffered at the hands of state actors motivated by a virulent white supremacy to make the Lovings’ desire to make a home for themselves in the state impossible. Part I briefly describes the Lovings’ struggle against Virginia’s Racial …
Enemy And Ally: Religion In Loving V. Virginia And Beyond, Leora F. Eisenstadt
Enemy And Ally: Religion In Loving V. Virginia And Beyond, Leora F. Eisenstadt
Fordham Law Review
Throughout the Loving case, religion appeared both overtly and subtly to endorse or lend credibility to the arguments against racial mixing. This use of religion is unsurprising given that supporters of slavery, white supremacy, and segregation have, for decades, turned to religion to justify their ideologies. Although these views are no longer mainstream, they have recently appeared again in arguments against same-sex marriage and gay and transgender rights generally. What is remarkable in the Loving case, however, is an alternate use of religion, not to justify white supremacy and segregation but instead to highlight the irrationality of its supporters’ claims. …
Loving’S Legacy: Decriminalization And The Regulation Of Sex And Sexuality, Melissa Murray
Loving’S Legacy: Decriminalization And The Regulation Of Sex And Sexuality, Melissa Murray
Fordham Law Review
2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated bans on miscegenation and interracial marriages. In the years since Loving was decided, it remains a subject of intense scholarly debate and attention. The conventional wisdom suggests that the Court’s decision in Loving was hugely transformative— decriminalizing interracial marriages and relationships and removing the most pernicious legal barriers to such couplings. But other developments suggest otherwise. If we shift our lens from marriages to other areas of the law—child custody cases, for example—Loving’s legacy seems less rosy. In the years preceding and following Loving, …
Prejudice, Constitutional Moral Progress, And Being “On The Right Side Of History”: Reflections On Loving V. Virginia At Fifty, Linda C. Mcclain
Prejudice, Constitutional Moral Progress, And Being “On The Right Side Of History”: Reflections On Loving V. Virginia At Fifty, Linda C. Mcclain
Fordham Law Review
Looking back at the record in Loving, this Article shows the role played by narratives of constitutional moral progress, in which the Lovings and their amici indicted Virginia’s antimiscegenation law as an “odious” relic of slavery and a present-day reflection of racial prejudice. In response, Virginia sought to distance such laws from prejudice and white supremacy by appealing to “the most recent” social science that identified problems posed by “intermarriage,” particularly for children. Such work also rejected the idea that intermarriage was a path toward progress and freedom from prejudice. This Article concludes by briefly examining the appeal to Loving …
Loving Lessons: White Supremacy, Loving V. Virginia, And Disproportionality In The Child Welfare System, Leah A. Hill
Loving Lessons: White Supremacy, Loving V. Virginia, And Disproportionality In The Child Welfare System, Leah A. Hill
Fordham Law Review
Part I of this Article introduces a brief discussion of the history of antimiscegenation laws and, specifically, their prevalence in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the 1950s. Next, Part II sets forth a short commentary about the Lovings’ triumph over antimiscegenation. Part III then details the Lovings’ judicial hurdles against the state, which argued that its antimiscegenation laws were enacted, in part, to prevent child abuse and thus served legitimate state interests. Part IV argues that the remnants of the white supremacist ideology at the center of Loving appear in our modern child welfare system, which has long been plagued …