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Full-Text Articles in Law
What Is Nonmarriage?, Katharine Baker
What Is Nonmarriage?, Katharine Baker
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As rates of cohabitation rise, and marriage becomes a status reserved almost exclusively for socio-economic elites, the scholarly calls for family law to recognize more nonmarital families grow stronger by the day. This Article unpacks contemporary proposals to recognize more nonmarital families and juxtaposes those proposals with family law’s contemporary marital regime. Family law’s status-based system provides a mostly simple and efficient means of distributing resources at the end of a marriage by imposing a formulaic, but distinctly communitarian, non-market-based approach to obligation, entitlement, and value. In full, the Article defends family law’s status-based system for what it does well, …
Quacking Like A Duck? Functional Parenthood Doctrine And Same-Sex Parents, Katharine Baker
Quacking Like A Duck? Functional Parenthood Doctrine And Same-Sex Parents, Katharine Baker
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Part I of this article introduces the tension between constitutionally protected parental autonomy rights and functional parent doctrine by examining the constitutional rights of parents. This examination demonstrates how the marital status of a parent has a substantial impact on the strength of that parent's constitutional rights. In cases in which there are two unmarried (never married or divorced) parents, neither parent has particularly robust constitutionally protected autonomy rights because both parents have competing constitutional rights that must be balanced against each other. Each parent has the right to invoke a court's jurisdiction in vindication of his or her own …
The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine Baker
The Dna Default And Its Discontents: Establishing Modern Parenthood, Katharine Baker
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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 …
It's Complicated: Privacy And Domestic Violence, Kimberly D. Bailey
It's Complicated: Privacy And Domestic Violence, Kimberly D. Bailey
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This Article challenges the notion that there is no role for privacy in the domestic violence context. Privacy is a complicated concept that has both positive and negative aspects, and this Article examines the value that more privacy could provide for domestic violence victims. While privacy was historically used as a shield for batterers, more privacy for domestic violence victims could protect their personhood, ensuring that they are treated with dignity and respect. In addition, current mandatory criminal justice policies have become so intrusive in many victims’ lives that limitations are needed to prevent the threat of state abuse. These …
Response To Beth Richie’S Black Feminism, Gender Violence And The Build-Up Of A Prison Nation, Kimberly D. Bailey
Response To Beth Richie’S Black Feminism, Gender Violence And The Build-Up Of A Prison Nation, Kimberly D. Bailey
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No abstract provided.
Lost In Translation: Domestic Violence, "The Personal Is Political," And The Criminal Justice System, Kimberly D. Bailey
Lost In Translation: Domestic Violence, "The Personal Is Political," And The Criminal Justice System, Kimberly D. Bailey
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No abstract provided.
Homogenous Rules For Heterogeneous Families: The Standardization Of Family Law When There Is No Standard Family, Katharine K. Baker
Homogenous Rules For Heterogeneous Families: The Standardization Of Family Law When There Is No Standard Family, Katharine K. Baker
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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
Marriage And Parenthood As Status And Rights: The Growing, Problematic And Possibly Constitutional Trend To Disaggregate Family Status From Family Rights, Katharine K. Baker
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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 Aftermath Of Crawford And Davis: Deconstructing The Sound Of Silence, Kimberly D. Bailey
The Aftermath Of Crawford And Davis: Deconstructing The Sound Of Silence, Kimberly D. Bailey
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No abstract provided.
Bionormativity And The Construction Of Parenthood, Katharine K. Baker
Bionormativity And The Construction Of Parenthood, Katharine K. Baker
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This piece explores the relationship between legal and biological parenthood. It examines how neither history, nor evolutionary biology nor moral philosophy dictate a legal regime in which parenthood must be based on biological connection, but that attraction to a biological (or “bionormative”) regime remains strong. In explaining why, it suggests that much of what attracts people to bionormativity is not biology itself, but the way in which a biological regime constructs parenthood as a private, exclusive and binary enterprise. It is these ancillary qualities of bionormativity that people may care the most about. Today, a variety of forces put pressure …
Supporting Children, Balancing Lives, Katharine K. Baker
Supporting Children, Balancing Lives, Katharine K. Baker
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This paper examines how U.S. child support policy validates traditional divisions of labor and thereby hinders individual attempts to achieve an acceptable work/family balance. It argues that by using the household as the relevant unit of measurement for child support purposes, family law doctrine legitimates the specialization contracts that arise within households. These specialization contracts, used most extensively in wealthy, elite households, undermine attempts to distribute caretaking and provider roles more equally between parents. The article suggest that by dispensing with the household as the relevant unit of measurement and treating all parents individually, each with a responsibility to caretake …
Prenuptial Agreements: A New Reason To Revive An Old Rule, Jeffrey G. Sherman
Prenuptial Agreements: A New Reason To Revive An Old Rule, Jeffrey G. Sherman
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No abstract provided.
Asymmetric Parenthood, Katharine K. Baker
Asymmetric Parenthood, Katharine K. Baker
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This analysis of the American Law Institute's Principles of Family Law, Chapter 3, examines how the Principles perceive the origins and extent of parental obligation. What is that makes someone financially responsible for a child? Perhaps surprisingly, the Drafters of this key chapter of the Principles spend remarkably little time analyzing that question. Instead, to determine who has parental obligation, the Principles rely on extant legal paternity and parenthood doctrine that is itself completely muddled. To determine the extent of parental obligation, the Principles employ a binary biological ideal of parenthood that fails to reflect reality for close to half …
Bargaining Or Biology? The History And Future Of Paternity Law And Parental Status, Katharine K. Baker
Bargaining Or Biology? The History And Future Of Paternity Law And Parental Status, Katharine K. Baker
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In practice, paternity rulings are remarkably unimportant. With the exception of state welfare authorities pursuing mostly impoverished biological fathers, few paternity actions are brought, few mothers want to bring them and (even with state-sponsored pursuit) very few dollars get transferred to children as a result of them. In theory, however, paternity judgments are very and perniciously important because they keep alive the biological fatherhood ideal, an ideal that has never been reflected in law or fact and that is inconsistent with the emerging law of parental rights and responsibilities. This article challenges the biological fatherhood ideal and suggests that contract, …
Domestic Partnership And Erisa Preemption, Jeffrey G. Sherman
Domestic Partnership And Erisa Preemption, Jeffrey G. Sherman
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No abstract provided.
Alternative Caretaking And Family Autonomy: Some Thoughts In Response To Dorothy Roberts, Katharine K. Baker
Alternative Caretaking And Family Autonomy: Some Thoughts In Response To Dorothy Roberts, Katharine K. Baker
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No abstract provided.
Dialectics And Domestic Abuse, Katharine K. Baker
Dialectics And Domestic Abuse, Katharine K. Baker
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No abstract provided.
Property Rules Meet Feminist Needs: Respecting Autonomy By Valuing Connection, Katharine K. Baker
Property Rules Meet Feminist Needs: Respecting Autonomy By Valuing Connection, Katharine K. Baker
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No abstract provided.
Taking Care Of Our Daughters, A Book Review Of Martha Fineman, The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family And Other Twentieth Century Tragedies, Katharine K. Baker
Taking Care Of Our Daughters, A Book Review Of Martha Fineman, The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family And Other Twentieth Century Tragedies, Katharine K. Baker
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No abstract provided.
Comment, Contracting For Security: Paying Married Women What They've Earned, Katharine K. Baker
Comment, Contracting For Security: Paying Married Women What They've Earned, Katharine K. Baker
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No abstract provided.