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Full-Text Articles in Law

Marital Status And Privilege, Laura Rosenbury Nov 2015

Marital Status And Privilege, Laura Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

This essay challenges the privilege attaching to marriage as a distinct form of relationship. Responding to Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s new book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, the essay identifies the legal and extralegal privileges flowing not just to monoracial marriage but to marriage. States recognize and support one form of relationship between adults to the exclusion of all others, creating privilege that flows outside of the home into the workplace and beyond. Instead of arguing that such privilege should be distributed more equally between monoracial and multiracial couples, this essay seeks to …


Federal Visions Of Private Family Support, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Federal Visions Of Private Family Support, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

This Article offers a new perspective on the relationship between family and federalism by analyzing why the government — whether state or federal — recognizes family at all. The Article examines the current balance between state and federal authority over family by reviewing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Astrue v. Capato, upholding the Social Security Administration’s deference to states’ intestacy laws when distributing benefits to posthumously conceived children, and United States v. Windsor, in which the Court struck down a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Although each decision affirmed the states’ primary role in defining family …


Rights And Realities, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Rights And Realities, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

The author responds to Melissa Murray's article, The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers, 94 Va. L. Rev. 385 (2008).


Work Wives, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Work Wives, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

Traditional notions of male and female roles remain tenacious at home and work even in the face of gender-neutral family laws and robust employment discrimination laws. This Article analyzes the challenge of gender tenacity through the lens of the “work wife.” The continued use of the marriage metaphor at work reveals that the dynamics of marriage flow between home and work, creating a feedback loop that inserts gender into both domains in multiple ways. This phenomenon may reinforce gender stereotypes, hindering the potential of law to achieve gender equality. But such gender tenacity need not always lead to subordination. The …


Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law, Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law, Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

Some commentators, perhaps a minority, have argued that the Equal Protection Clause should be read to require the use of race-conscious policies when necessary to eradicate or remedy the most serious consequences of racial inequality. Others have argued that such policies, though not required, should be permitted when duly adopted by the majority of the populace to promote the interests of an historically oppressed minority. Still others, including now a majority of the Supreme Court, take the view that the Constitution forbids virtually all explicit uses of race by the state. In this Essay, we do not enter this debate …


Between Home And School, Laura Rosenbury Oct 2015

Between Home And School, Laura Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

This article challenges family law's traditional paradigm for allocating authority between parents, children and the state. Pursuant to that paradigm, parents enjoy almost complete authority over their children while at home; the state may require children to attend school and may regulate school curricula; and children must submit to the authority of either their parents or teachers. This settled equilibrium ignores a fundamental reality: children are not confined to home and school. Much of childhood takes place in spaces between home and school, at playgrounds, churches, sporting fields, music rooms and after-school clubs. Family law has been virtually silent about …


Sex In And Out Of Intimacy, Laura A. Rosenbury, Jennifer E. Rothman Oct 2015

Sex In And Out Of Intimacy, Laura A. Rosenbury, Jennifer E. Rothman

Laura A. Rosenbury

The state has long attempted to regulate sexual activity by channeling sex into various forms of state-supported intimacy. Although commentators and legal scholars of diverse political perspectives generally believe such regulation is declining, the freedom to engage in diverse sexual activities has not been established as a matter of law. Instead, courts have extended legal protection to consensual sexual acts only to the extent such acts support other state interests, most often marriage and procreation. Although Lawrence v. Texas altered some aspects of that vision, it reinscribed others by suggesting that sexual activity should be protected from state interference only …


Working Relationships, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Working Relationships, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

In this Essay written for the symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," I extend my previous consideration of friendship to the specific context of the workplace, analyzing friendship through the lens of the ties that arise at work instead of those assumed to arise within the home. Many adults spend half or more of their waking hours at work, in the process forming relationships with supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, customers, and other third parties. Although such relationships are at times primarily transactional, at other times they take on intimate qualities similar to those of family …


Feminist Legal Scholarship: Charting Topics And Authors, 1978-2002, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Feminist Legal Scholarship: Charting Topics And Authors, 1978-2002, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

In their call for papers, the organizers of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law’s Spring 2003 symposium “Why a Feminist Law Journal?” posed several questions, including: "Are feminist law journals a victim of their own success? Have they outlived their usefulness?" and "What is the state of feminist legal scholarship today? What constitutes feminist scholarship?" As a new member of the legal academy, my answers to their questions depend on answers to two more basic questions: What has been published in feminist law journals? And, how do those articles relate to feminist articles published in non-specialty, or flagship, law …


Two Ways To End A Marriage: Divorce Or Death, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Two Ways To End A Marriage: Divorce Or Death, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

Default rules governing property distribution at divorce and death are often identified as one of the primary benefits of marriage. This Article examines these default rules in all fifty states, exposing the ways property distribution differs depending on whether the marriage ends by divorce or death. The result is often counter-intuitive: in most states, a spouse is likely to receive more property if her marriage ends by divorce than if the marriage lasts until "death do us part." This difference can be explained in part by the choices of feminist activists over the past thirty-five years: feminists played a large …


Friends With Benefits, Laura A. Rosenbury Oct 2015

Friends With Benefits, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely friendship. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without. Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways that the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have …