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Full-Text Articles in Law
Accommodating Vulnerability, Annette Ruth Appell
Accommodating Vulnerability, Annette Ruth Appell
annette appell
Unlike other social categories, such as race, gender, sexual identity, and disability, the category of childhood has received little critical examination in the legal academy. Like other socio-legal categories with natural referents, however, childhood masks the contingency and normativity of behavior, expectations, power, and regulation, rendering the social order natural and inevitable. Childhood also scripts behavior and produces subordination and privilege in a manner unique to the adult–child dichotomy, but which also intersects with class, gender, race, sexuality, sexual identity, and ability. As such, the category bears examination not only for what it reveals about ourselves—adults, but also how to …
Ghosts In The Postmodern Family, Annette Appell
Ghosts In The Postmodern Family, Annette Appell
annette appell
As legal theory and doctrine respond to the range and complexity of biological and social connections that increasingly compose families, they evoke a bionormative nuclear family framework for lesbian and gay families, stepfamilies and families created with outsourced reproductive materials or labor. This Article questions this approach because it disregards the complex foundational roles of biological relationships in American jurisprudence and fails to appreciate the unique aspects of kinship in these postmodern families. Instead, this Article anchors the postmodern family law movement in the physical, social and economic conditions that affect the most disaffected among us: those who are socially, …
Representing Children Representing What?, Annette Ruth Appell
Representing Children Representing What?, Annette Ruth Appell
annette appell
This essay reflects on how lawyering for children relates to the personhood of children and youth. More concretely, it critically explores the role of children’s lawyers in promoting the individual and systemic interests of their youthful constituents. At a time when children are increasingly viewed as rights-holders, provided with attorneys, and subject to coercive state intervention and restriction, questions regarding who speaks for children and how children’s voice informs discussions about childhood, dependency, family and community are particularly cogent. On behalf of individual, and classes of, children, lawyers are actively engaged in the creation, definition and promotion of rights regarding …