Law Commons^™

The Case For American Muslim Arbitration, Rabea Benhalim

Publications

This Article advocates for the creation of Muslim arbitral tribunals in the United States. These tribunals would better meet the needs of American Muslims, who currently bring their religious disputes to informal forums that lack transparency. Particularly problematic, these existing forums often apply legal precedent developed in majority-Muslim nations, without taking into consideration the changed circumstances of Muslim living as minorities in the United States. These interpretations of Islamic law can have especially negative impacts on women. American Muslim arbitration tribunals offer the potential to correct these inadequacies. Furthermore, a new arbitral system could better meet the needs of sophisticated …

Baby M Turns 30: The Law And Policy Of Surrogate Motherhood, Eric A. Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article marks the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court of New Jersey’s Baby M decision by offering a critical analysis of surrogacy policy in the United States. Despite fundamental changes in both science and society since the case was decided, state courts and legislatures remain bitterly divided on the legality of surrogacy. In arguing for a more uniform, permissive legal posture toward surrogacy, the article addresses five central debates in the surrogacy literature.

First, should the legal system accommodate those seeking conception through surrogacy, or should it prohibit such arrangements? Second, if surrogacy is permitted, what steps can be …

The Choice Theory Of Contracts – Preface & Introduction, Hanoch Dagan, Michael Heller

Faculty Scholarship

This concise landmark in law and jurisprudence offers the first coherent, liberal account of contract law. "The Choice Theory of Contracts" answers the field's most pressing questions: What is the “freedom” in “freedom of contract”? What core values animate contract law and how do those values interrelate? How must the state act when it shapes contract law? Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller show exactly why and how freedom matters to contract. They start with the most appealing tenets of modern liberalism and end with their implications for contract law. This readable, engaging book gives contract scholars, teachers, and students a …

Family Law And Entrepreneurial Action, D. Gordon Smith

Faculty Scholarship

In "The Contractual Foundation of Family-Business Law," Benjamin Means aspires to lay the groundwork for a law of family businesses. In this brief response essay, I suggest that a workable family-business law along the lines suggested by Means is consistent with an overarching policy in the United States of promoting entrepreneurial action, and I evaluate the proposal against this policy goal, with particular attention to Means’s arguments in favor of “family-business defaults” and his concern over the potentially disruptive role of fiduciary law.

The Puzzle Of Family Law Pluralism, Erez Aloni

All Faculty Publications

Family law is succumbing to pluralism. Scholars have celebrated this trend as a desirable outcome of the struggle for marriage equality. And a pluralistic family law seems to offer distinct benefits: more regimes than just marriage, and greater room for choice within each regime (manifest by more types of legally enforceable intrafamilial contracts). This Article exposes counterintuitive facts that lead to a surprising conclusion: the legal changes that scholars tout as increasing pluralism eviscerate the substance of the choices families are permitted to make.

The policies that appear to extend choice within each regime, in fact, mask what I call …

Due Date: Enforcing Surrogacy Promises In The Best Interest Of The Child, Browne C. Lewis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Lewis argues that the courts should apply contract principles and not family law principles to resolve surrogacy disputes. Since children are unique, Professor Lewis argues, courts should presume that the contract should be specifically enforced. As a result, the intended mother should be adjudicated the legal mother. However, Professor Lewis further argues the the surrogate should be able to present evidence of changed circumstances to rebut the presumption of specific performance and permit the court to determine maternity based upon the best interests of the child.

Beyond Family Law, Sarah Abramowicz

Law Faculty Research Publications

Family law has traditionally been treated as an exceptional field, a marginalized and special case in which the usual rules of the legal canon do not apply. This Article argues that the current challenge to family-law exceptionalism has been largely one way, to the detriment of a central concern of family law: the protection of children and of the parent-child relationship. Family-law scholars have focused primarily on whether and how to import the tools and insights of other areas of law into the zone of family relations, while largely overlooking the possibility that the tools and insights of family law …

Legal Regulation Of Twenty-First-Century Families, Marsha Garrison, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This post includes the table of contents, introduction and our comment as the editors of an interdisciplinary volume that explores the implications for law and policy of changes in marriage and family over the past half century. The volume includes chapters by leading social science researchers and family law scholars whose work focuses on these matters. The book captures the complexity of debates about the regulation of marriage and families and the best policy paths forward, through contributions by authors with widely varying perspectives. But it also aims to inform these debates by situating them in a framework grounded in …

A Maternalistic Approach To Surrogacy: Comment On Richard Epstein's Surrogacy: The Case For Full Contractual Enforcement, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Many of the other participants in this Symposium have written extensively about surrogacy. Not only have they contributed to the debate, in some instances they have framed it. In some respects, therefore, I merely thank all of them and chime in. Unlike my fellow panelists, however, I do not think surrogacy merits an enthusiastic, positive response.

In this Comment, I propose to restate objections to specifically enforceable surrogacy contracts from a family-law perspective as well as from the philosophical or psychological roots of family law. I will then reexamine the problems of surrogacy from a contractarian, law-and-economics perspective, showing how …

Chapter 5 - Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery And Divorce In Nineteenth-Century America (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

In the covenant of marriage, woman is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master -- the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. He has so framed the law of divorce . . . as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women -- the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.