Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Law

Toward Equality: Nonmarital Children And The Uniform Probate Code, Paula A. Monopoli Jun 2012

Toward Equality: Nonmarital Children And The Uniform Probate Code, Paula A. Monopoli

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article traces the evolution of the Uniform Probate Code's (UPC) broad equality framework for inheritance by nonmarital children in the context of the wider movement for legal equality for such children in society. It concludes that the UPC is to be lauded for its efforts to provide equal treatment to all nonmarital children. The UPC's commitment to such equality serves an expressive function for state legislatures and courts to follow its lead. The UPC has fulfilled its promise that all children regardless of marital status shall be equal for purposes of inheritance from or through parents, with one exception: …


A Betrayed Ideal: The Problem Of Enforcement Of Eu Sex Equality Guarantees In The Cee Post-Socialist Legal Systems, Goran Selanec Jan 2012

A Betrayed Ideal: The Problem Of Enforcement Of Eu Sex Equality Guarantees In The Cee Post-Socialist Legal Systems, Goran Selanec

SJD Dissertations

The notion of equality between men and women has, for a long time, played a significant role in the societies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The ideal was particularly important during the period of “real” or “really existing” socialism in CEE. For the CEE socialist regimes, the ideal of equality was an ideological banner that supposedly demonstrated their moral superiority to the “West”. The ideal has gained new importance in recent years, when the CEE post-socialist states had to commit to the protection of the notion of equality between sexes as a condition of their membership in the European …


Civil Marriage: Threat To Democracy, Jessica Knouse Jan 2012

Civil Marriage: Threat To Democracy, Jessica Knouse

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article argues that civil marriage and democracy are inherently incompatible, whether assessed from a transcultural perspective that reduces them to their most universal aspects or a culturally situated perspective that accounts for their uniquely American elaborations. Across virtually all cultures, civil marriage privileges sexual partners by offering them exclusive access to highly desirable government benefits, while democracy presupposes liberty and equality. When governments privilege sexual partners, they effectively deprive their citizens of liberty by encouraging them to enter sexual partnerships rather than selfdetermining based on their own preferences; they effectively deprive their citizens of equality by establishing insidious status …


The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr. Jan 2012

The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

On Sunday, September 19, 1886, Moses Harman, the editor of the radical newspaper Lucifer the Light-Bearer, presided over an inherently contradictory event-a free-love marriage ceremony between his associate editor, the thirty-seven-year-old Edwin Walker, and Moses' own daughter, the sixteen-year-old Lillian. The case that the two Harmans and Walker wished to present aimed to transform marriage from a public to a private relationship and from a permanent and exclusive one to a temporary one that permitted potentially many partners. State v. Walker and its parties have received some scholarly notice, but the truly radical quality of the arguments Moses, Edwin, and …


Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard Jan 2012

Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Parenting is a major preoccupation in law and culture. As a result of efforts of the American women's movement over the past forty years, the legal parent is, for the first time in history, sex-neutral. Our law has abandoned restrictions on women's education, employment, and civic participation that sprang from and reinforced beliefs about the primacy of motherhood as women's best destiny. On the flip side, U.S. law now also generally rejects formal constraints on men's family roles by requiring sex-neutrality of laws regulating custody, adoption, alimony, spousal benefits, and the like. The official de-linking of presumptive parenting roles from …


Equality, Susanne Baer Jan 2012

Equality, Susanne Baer

Book Chapters

This article first discusses key equality guarantees in law today. It then focuses on different understandings of the right to equality: as either a principle or an individually enforceable claim (the status); as an ‘empty idea’, a rationality test, or a ‘substantive’ right (the content); as a right of individuals or for groups (who bears the right?). It next examines equality as categorically distinctly structured as opposed to or as similar to other liberty interests (the test); as a general entitlement or as a specific guarantee to address particular inequalities, either separate or intersecting (the inequalities); and as general or …