Abolishing the Family

Abstract

Family law scholarship is replete with calls for reform. Yet gender-, race-, and class-based inequalities within and across families remain intractable. So what if, instead of reforming the family, we abolish it?Abolishing the family might sound like a startling idea for a family-law analysis, especially after decades of efforts to expand the legal understanding of “family.” But the proposal is hardly new. In this Article, we lay the groundwork for integrating family abolitionist ideas, which have until now mostly taken place outside of law, into family law scholarship.While family abolition is in many ways a radical departure from current family law reform projects and scholarship, we show that abolitionist thinking is not wholly unprecedented even in these settings. Our analysis provides a taxonomy synthesizing legal and non-legal critiques that strike at core features of the family. In particular, we identify five theoretical models that we discover in the existing literature and that we argue provide different paths towards family abolition. They are: the direct compensation model, the communal care model, the friendship model, the disaggregation model, and the statist model. Each model envisions a world in which law does not maintain the family’s narrowly defined status as a distinctive entity meriting special rules. We end by operationalizing these models and consider how each might respond to the various family law problems that we set out, all of which focus on care—who performs it, who receives it, and how it is valued.Engaging in an abolitionist, as opposed to reformist, project provides a way to address problems in family law that have proven intransigent and reveals why reforms have been so difficult to implement. To be clear, we are not advocating for any particular path to accomplish family abolition. Instead, we are dismantling the veneer of inevitability and appeals to nature that couch discussions of both the family and family law. Ultimately, this Article seeks to expand conversations about family law to include family abolition and, in turn, conversations about family abolition to include family law