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Full-Text Articles in Law

Campus Misconduct, Sexual Harm And Appropriate Process: The Essential Sexuality Of It All, Katharine K. Baker Dec 2016

Campus Misconduct, Sexual Harm And Appropriate Process: The Essential Sexuality Of It All, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

No abstract provided.


The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine K. Baker Nov 2016

The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

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 …


Campus Sexual Misconduct As Sexual Harassment: A Defense Of The Doe, Katharine K. Baker May 2016

Campus Sexual Misconduct As Sexual Harassment: A Defense Of The Doe, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

This article explains and defends the Department of Education’s campaign against sexual misconduct on college campuses. It does so because DOE has inexplicably failed to make clear that their goal is to protect women from the intimidating and hostile environment that results when men routinely use women sexually, without regard to whether women consent to the sexual activity. That basic point, that schools are policing harassing and intimidating behavior, not necessarily rape, has been lost on both courts and commentators. Boorish, entitled, sexual behavior that stops well short of rape, if pervasive enough, has been actionable as sexual harassment for …


Legitimate Families And Equal Protection, Katharine K. Baker Dec 2014

Legitimate Families And Equal Protection, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

Abstract: This Article questions whether and why it should be unconstitutional to treat legitimate and illegitimate children differently. It argues that legitimacy doctrine is rooted in a biological essentialism completely at odds with contemporary efforts to expand legal recognition of nontraditional parenting practices including same-sex parenting, single parenthood by choice, surrogacy, and sperm donation. The routine invocation of legitimacy doctrine by advocates purporting to help nontraditional families is thus at best ironic and at worst dangerous. Analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s legitimacy cases reveals that liberal Justices, in trying to dismantle marriage—a legal construct—as the arbiter of legitimate parenthood, …


Homogenous Rules For Heterogeneous Families: The Standardization Of Family Law When There Is No Standard Family, Katharine K. Baker Dec 2011

Homogenous Rules For Heterogeneous Families: The Standardization Of Family Law When There Is No Standard Family, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

The article explores the ironies involved in the contemporary enforcement of family obligations. As forms of intimate partnership and parenthood become ever more varied, the law of family obligation - child support, property division and alimony - has become increasingly routine and formulaic. As scholars increasingly call for more attention to the varied ways in which different individuals and communities structure their care networks and their intimate lives, the law of family obligation has become less, not more attentive to context. This piece explains how the law’s rejection of context is an understandable reaction to the growing diversity of family …


Marriage And Parenthood As Status And Rights: The Growing, Problematic And Possibly Constitutional Trend To Disaggregate Family Status From Family Rights, Katharine K. Baker Dec 2009

Marriage And Parenthood As Status And Rights: The Growing, Problematic And Possibly Constitutional Trend To Disaggregate Family Status From Family Rights, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

In upholding Proposition 8 one year after finding that same sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, the California Supreme Court followed a growing trend in family law to sever family rights from family status. The Court found that same sex couples were constitutionally entitled to the legal incidents of marriage, but not marriage itself. In the last 30 years, courts and legislatures have increasingly recognized a variety of different family forms by granting people in them the legal incidents of family relationship (Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships for couples, Visitation and De Facto Parenthood for caretakers) without granting …


The Stories Of Marriage, Katharine K. Baker Dec 2009

The Stories Of Marriage, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

The gay and lesbian community's response to California's Proposition 8 was strong and quick. Within days of the 2008 election, opponents of the measure had targeted its proponents, in particular the Mormon Church, as subjects for scorn. Singling out the Mormon Church on this issue was particularly ironic because to the extent that members of the Mormon Church were responsible for the success of Proposition 8, they simply did to the gay community what courts of the United States consistently did to their forebears: defined away their right to marry. In striking down individuals' rights to enter into polygamous marriages, …


Asking What Before We Ask Why: Taxonomy, Etiology And Rape, Katharine K. Baker Jan 2003

Asking What Before We Ask Why: Taxonomy, Etiology And Rape, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

This article presents a spectrum of sexual coersion. By looking at the social meaning of the different acts of coercion along the spectrum, the author suggests that most acts of sexual coercion can be classified as either rape (a sexual act with intent to do harm to the victim) or sex (a sexual act engaged in without any intent to harm the victim). Ironically, though, the author suggests that the most and least egregious acts of sexual aggression, that is, the acts we most readily identify as rape and the acts we are most reluctant to label rape are the …


Alternative Caretaking And Family Autonomy: Some Thoughts In Response To Dorothy Roberts, Katharine K. Baker Jan 2001

Alternative Caretaking And Family Autonomy: Some Thoughts In Response To Dorothy Roberts, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

Dorothy Roberts's analysis of the ways in which current kinship foster care arrangements highlight the need for more state support of caregiving and perversely sever familial bonds in the African American community raises important issues for those concerned about caregiving and the legal treatment of families.' In this short response, I will address two of those issues. First, I argue that it is important to understand how state support for caregiving can reify primary caretaker norms and undermine alternative care arrangements that have proven so valuable in communities of color. Second, I suggest that attempts to strengthen family ties must …


Sex, Rape And Shame, Katharine K. Baker Jan 1999

Sex, Rape And Shame, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

This article explores how shame sanctions may be able to change the social meaning and decrease the prevalence of date rape. Arguing that men's tendency to date rape is fostered by social norms that treat sex as an accomplishment and, importantly, an accomplishment that enhances a man's masculinity status, the article suggests that one way to curb date rape is to curb the extent to which it is associated with masculine behavior. This strategy is necessary because the high premium society places on masculinity and the cultural confusion about when date rape is morally wrong and how it is different …