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Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Law

Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax Jan 2008

Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

The past 30 years have witnessed a dramatic divergence in family structure by social class, income, education, and race. This article reviews the data on these trends, explores their significance, and assesses social scientists’ recent attempts to explain them. The article concludes that society-wide changes in economic conditions or social expectations cannot account for these patterns. Rather, for reasons that are poorly understood, cultural disparities have emerged by class and race in attitudes and behaviors surrounding family, sexuality, and reproduction. These disparities will likely fuel social and economic inequality and contribute to disparities in children’s life prospects for decades to …


Red Versus Blue (And Purple) States In The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: From Values Polarization To Common Ground?, Linda C. Mcclain Jan 2008

Red Versus Blue (And Purple) States In The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: From Values Polarization To Common Ground?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of courts in circumstances of "values polarization"? The framing of this question brings to mind, but differs from, some familiar inquiries about the judicial role in circumstances of conscientious moral disagreement or value pluralism and debates about liberty, morality, and community. Using the conflict over whether civil marriage should extend to same-sex couples as an example, I contrast two recent analyses of values polarization and its implications for finding agreement, Ronald Dworkin’s book, Is Democracy Possible Here?, and June Carbone and Naomi Cahn's project, Red Families v. Blue Families. Dworkin's strategy is to identify shared principles …


Valuing All Families: An Introduction To The 2008 Santa Clara Law Review Symposium, Nancy Polikoff Jan 2008

Valuing All Families: An Introduction To The 2008 Santa Clara Law Review Symposium, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The family has changed over time, as has the law concerning families and relationships. Thank goodness. Until recent decades, the law punished nonmarital sex, delineated separate spheres for men and women, and restricted the grounds for ending marriage. The sexual revolution, feminism, and the demand for divorce were the social phenomena that facilitated these changes. Today we take for granted that marriage is not the right dividing line for the rights and obligations of parents. We now must revise our laws to protect the economic security and emotional peace of mind of the full variety of today's families and relationships.


Ketubah, The Marriage Contract Under Jewish Law, And Its Application In Secular Legal Systems, Marketa Trimble Jan 2008

Ketubah, The Marriage Contract Under Jewish Law, And Its Application In Secular Legal Systems, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

The article presents ketubah, an institute of Jewish law that is unknown in the current Czech academic literature; it describes its evolution and content, and the manner in which secular countries with large Jewish communities deal with it. Throughout the centuries ketubah achieved a standardized format that has been adjusted to local customs. Additionally, there are attempts to use ketubah to solve the problem of agunah – the problem of parties who have obtained a secular divorce but not a divorce under Jewish law because the other party prevented it. Some legal systems, such as those of the State of …


Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink Jan 2008

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …


Legal Status And Effect On Children, Margaret F. Brinig, Steven L. Nock Jan 2008

Legal Status And Effect On Children, Margaret F. Brinig, Steven L. Nock

Journal Articles

One of the haunting claims of each poor, unmarried mother in Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep is that at least she can guarantee she will love her child, even though she cannot promise to make a lifelong commitment to a mate. That love, each young mother says, will be a sustaining gift both to her and the child. Similarly, in work done by sociologists McLanahan and Garfinkel to counteract the claim that it was not single parenting that made children's prospects dim, but poverty, sociologists have found that many of the bad effects of single parenting go away …