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Full-Text Articles in Family Law

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink Jan 2008

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …


Legal Accountability In The Service-Based Welfare State: Lessons From Child Welfare Reform, Kathleen G. Noonan, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon Jan 2008

Legal Accountability In The Service-Based Welfare State: Lessons From Child Welfare Reform, Kathleen G. Noonan, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Current trends intensify the longstanding problem of how the rule-of-law should be institutionalized in the welfare state. Welfare programs are being re-designed to increase their capacities to adapt to rapidly changing conditions and to tailor their responses to diverse clienteles. These developments challenge the understanding of legal accountability developed in the Warren Court era. This Article reports on an emerging model of accountable administration that strives to reconcile programmatic flexibility with rule-of-law values. The model has been developed in the reform of state child protective services systems, but it has potentially broad application to public law. It also has novel …