Family, Life Course, and Society Commons^™

When Law Is Complicit In Gender Bias: Ending De Jure Discrimination Against Women As An Important Target Of Sustainable Development Goal 5, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

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Ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but also crucial to accelerating sustainable development. The very first target of Goal 5. 1.1 calls to end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere and the indicator for the goal is: “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex”. In many countries around the world the legal frameworks themselves allow for both direct (de jure) and indirect (de facto) discrimination against women. This essay identifies some areas …

Why Baby Markets Aren’T Free, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Creating families in the twenty-first century increasingly happens in markets where the buying and selling of reproductive goods and services are facilitated by advanced technologies, the internet, contracts, and state laws and policies. Thus, the title of this international congress—“Baby Markets”—aptly captures a key aspect of modern reproduction. The ability of potential parents to engage in market transactions involving children enhances parents’ autonomy over their family lives. The free market seems to liberate us from the constraints of biology and state control.

This Essay argues, however, that baby markets aren’t free. Three aspects of the way reproductive goods and services …

Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri

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Despite a transformative half century of social change, marital status still matters. The marriage equality movement has drawn attention to the many benefits conferred in law by marriage at a time when the “marriage gap” between affluent and poor Americans widens and rates of nonmarital childbearing soar. This Essay explores the contested history of marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—through the lens of the “illegitimacy” cases of the 1960s and 1970s. Often remembered as a triumph for nonmarital families, these decisions defined the constitutional harm of illegitimacy classifications as the unjust punishment of innocent children for the “sins” of their …

Diverging Destinies Redux, Amy L. Wax

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My recent “where to live” conversation with a newly hired colleague yielded an unsurprising list of “possibles”: selected blocks of Mount Airy and Germantown, plus the Main Line towns of Bryn Mawr, Ardmore, Haverford, Villanova, Gladwyne, and so forth. Despite my colleague’s professed open mind about potential neighborhoods, Jenkintown — my own somewhat obscure and distinctly unfashionable (but much more affordable) suburb — drew a blank stare, as did a dozen other solidly middleclass areas I mentioned. By my calculation, there are over 400 zip codes within a thirty-mile radius of Rittenhouse Square, which is in the center of downtown …

Reconciling Equal Protection Law In The Public And In The Family: The Role Of Racial Politics, Dorothy E. Roberts

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In Constitutional Colorblindness and the Family, Katie Eyer brings to our attention an intriguing contradiction in the Supreme Court's equal protection jurisprudence. Far from ending race‐based family law rules with its 1967 decision, Loving v. Virginia, the Court has ignored lower courts' decisions approving official uses of race in foster care, adoption, and custody decisions in the last half century. Thus, as Eyer observes, “during the same time that the Supreme Court has increasingly proclaimed the need to strictly scrutinize all government uses of race, family law has remained a bastion of racial permissiveness.”

Scholars who oppose race‐matching …

Historicizing The "End Of Men": The Politics Of Reaction(S), Serena Mayeri

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No abstract provided.

Are We Responsible For Who We Are? The Challenge For Criminal Law Theory In The Defenses Of Coercive Indoctrination And "Rotten Social Background", Paul H. Robinson

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Should coercive indoctrination or "rotten social background" be a defense to crime? Traditional desert-based excuse theory roundly rejects these defenses because the offender lacks cognitive or control dysfunction at the time of the offense. The standard coercive crime-control strategies of optimizing general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous similarly reject such defenses. Recognition of such defenses would tend to undermine, perhaps quite seriously, deterrence and incapacitation goals. Finally, the normative crime-control principle of empirical desert might support such an excuse, but only if the community's shared intuitions of justice support it. The law’s rejection of such defenses suggests that there …

Well-Being, Inequality And Time: The Time-Slice Problem And Its Policy Implications, Matthew D. Adler

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Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or “sublifetime” perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as “progressive” or “regressive,” should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a …

Child Welfare's Paradox, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

The Community Dimension Of State Child Protection, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Welfare Reform And Economic Freedom: Low-Income Mothers' Decisions About Work At Home And In The Market, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Child Welfare And Civil Rights, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Welfare Reform And Families In The Child Welfare System, Morgan B. Ward Doran, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Kinship Care And The Price Of State Support For Children, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Criminal Justice And Black Families: The Collateral Damage Of Over-Enforcement, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

The Moral Exclusivity Of The New Civil Society, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Is There Justice In Children's Rights?: The Critique Of Federal Family Preservation Policy, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Poverty, Race, And New Directions In Child Welfare Policy, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

A Feminist Social Justice Approach To Reproduction-Assisting Technologies: A Case Study On The Limits Of Liberal Theory, Joan C. Callahan, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Race And The New Reproduction, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Is Equal Access The Prescription For Equity?, Victor Sidel, Dorothy E. Roberts, Jennifer Dohrn, Kathy Anastos, Nitza Milagros Escalera, Peter Holland, Sylvia Kleinman, Sylvia Law, Jack O'Sullivan, Robert Padgug, Dennis Rivera, Beth Weitzman

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No abstract provided.

The Only Good Poor Woman: Unconstitutional Conditions And Welfare, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

The Value Of Black Mothers' Work, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Racism And Patriarchy In The Meaning Of Motherhood, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.