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Pragmatic Family Law, Clare Huntington
Pragmatic Family Law, Clare Huntington
Faculty Scholarship
Family law is a central battleground for a polarized America, with seemingly endless conflict over abortion, parental control of school curricula, gender-affirming health care for children, and similar flash points. This is hardly surprising for an area of law that implicates fundamental concerns about equality, bodily autonomy, sexual liberty, gender norms, parenting, and religion. Polarization poses significant risks to children and families, but centering contestation obscures another important reality. In many areas of doctrine and policy, family law has managed to avoid polarization, even for politically and socially combustible issues. Instead, states are converging on similar rules and policies, working …
The Institutions Of Family Law, Clare Huntington
The Institutions Of Family Law, Clare Huntington
Faculty Scholarship
Family law scholarship is thriving, with scholars using varied methodologies to analyze intimate partner violence, cohabitation, child maltreatment, juvenile misconduct, and child custody, to name but a few areas of study. Despite the richness of this discourse, however, most family law scholars ignore a key tool deployed in virtually every other legal-academic domain: institutional analysis. This methodology, which plays a foundational role in legal scholarship, focuses on four basic questions. Scholars often begin empirically, identifying the specific legal, social, and economic institutions that shape an area of legal regulation. Beyond descriptive accounts, scholars analyze how authority is and should be …