Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Arts and Humanities (1)
- Civil Rights and Discrimination (1)
- Family, Life Course, and Society (1)
- Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (1)
- History (1)
-
- Legal (1)
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (1)
- Policy History, Theory, and Methods (1)
- Politics and Social Change (1)
- Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration (1)
- Sexuality and the Law (1)
- Social Policy (1)
- Social and Behavioral Sciences (1)
- Sociology (1)
- Supreme Court of the United States (1)
- Women's History (1)
- Women's Studies (1)
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage And Parental Rights In The Age Of Equality, Serena Mayeri
Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage And Parental Rights In The Age Of Equality, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
The twentieth-century equality revolution established the principle of sex neutrality in the law of marriage and divorce and eased the most severe legal disabilities traditionally imposed upon nonmarital children. Formal equality under the law eluded nonmarital parents, however. Although unwed fathers won unprecedented legal rights and recognition in a series of Supreme Court cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to achieve constitutional parity with mothers or with married and divorced fathers. This Article excavates nonmarital fathers’ quest for equal rights, until now a mere footnote in the history of constitutional equality law.
Unmarried fathers lacked a social …
Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri
Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, I measure the majority’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges against two legacies of second-wave feminist legal advocacy: the largely successful campaign to make civil marriage formally gender-neutral; and the lesser-known struggle against laws and practices that penalized women who lived their lives outside of marriage. Obergefell obliquely acknowledges marriage equality’s debt to the first legacy without explicitly adopting sex equality arguments against same-sex marriage bans. The legacy of feminist campaigns for nonmarital equality, by contrast, is absent from Obergefell’s reasoning and belied by rhetoric that both glorifies marriage and implicitly disparages nonmarriage. Even so, the history …