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Full-Text Articles in Law and Society
The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine Baker
The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine Baker
All Faculty Scholarship
Most contemporary family law scholarship assumes that propriety of a DNA default for establishing parenthood - a presumption that, in the absence of marriage, whoever had the sex with the mother that resulted in the child should be the father of the child. This article problematizes that DNA default. It demonstrates how the DNA default necessarily magnifies the legal and social importance of sex, discounts the legal significance of women's reproductive labor, and marginalizes all children living outside the binary, heteronormative norm that a genetic regime necessarily edifies. When scrutinized, the DNA default looks just as moralistic and exclusionary as …
Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan
Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.