The Family in Civil Society

Civic societarians view deviance from the traditional two-parent family as the root of all social problems in the United States. Growing income inequality is central to understanding social decline as many families with young children are struggling financially to provide for their families. The real problem, then, is not with family form, but with the lack of support for dependency relationships

Beyond Equality and Discrimination

The societal frame of the “economically disadvantaged” is rooted in a distinction between a conceptual status of equality and the actuality of discrimination and disadvantage. This paradigm provides the governing logic for both criticism and justification of the status quo. This Article questions whether and to what extent this equality/antidiscrimination logic has lost its effectiveness as a critical tool and what, if anything, should be the foundation of the rationale that supplements or even replaces it

Why Marriage?

Reflection on the prospect of varied, individualized possibilities for the meaning of marriage suggests, that in order to answer the question why marriage? we must first consider what marriage? or more succinctly, what is marriage? Questioning what marriage actually is calls attention to the institution\u27s individualized and malleable nature. By contrast, a focus on why marriage highlights the societal function and rationale for the institution. I will discuss each question-the what as well as the why of marriage

Intimacy Outside of the Natural Family: The Limits of Privacy

In this paper I undertake a very pragmatic and focused consideration of whether it is possible to rework existing legal concepts of privacy in a way that would be ideologically compatible with dominant social norms in order to shield single mothers from excessive state regulation and supervision. I ultimately conclude that my desire to protect the decisionmaking autonomy and the dignity of poor and/or single mothers cannot be satisfied by resort to this area of law. At the constitutional level, this is so because notions of privacy are typically articulated as rights belonging to individuals, not family entities. And in the common law, the concepts of family or entity privacy similarly fail to protect poor and single mothers because these concepts have been developed and employed in the context of widely shared ideological constructions of what constitutes the natural family. This image of the natural family in turn serves as the norm in our understandings of intimacy in discussions of the family. For the law to assert that poor and/or single mothers are, or should be, included within the realm of normal and natural families, and therefore entitled to privacy, would require a leap of legal imagination not likely to be undertaken without the safety net of dominant social and cultural concurrence. The development of privacy doctrine has thus been limited by societal assumptions about intimacy, families, and individuality, and by ideas concerning fairness and just deserts. The question arises, however, whether privacy, even if it is a concept embedded in social and cultural presuppositions, could be rehabilitated or reworked to include single mother families? There are both ideological and doctrinal barriers to this endeavor. As things now stand, it does not seem likely that an emphasis on privacy will do anything other than further reinforce the ideology of the natural or normal family. In fact, it may be that continued emphasis on privacy as the concept to constitutionally protect certain sorts of intimate behavior will serve to deter the development of other legal principles that might help to limit state regulation of poor and single mother families

Beyond Equality and Discrimination

The theme of this Article for the SMU Law Review Forum focuses us on the challenges faced by the “economically disadvantaged” in the past decade and in the future. This framing is rooted in a distinction between that conceptual status of equality and the actuality of discrimination and disadvantage. This is the lens through which contemporary legal culture tends to assess the nature and effect of existing laws and determines the necessary direction of reform. As such, this paradigm provides the governing logic for both criticism and justification of the status quo. It is rooted in an understanding of the significance of the human being and a belief in their fundamental parity under law that also asserts the inherent value of individual liberty and autonomy, and thus is skeptical of state intervention into the “private” sphere of life

The Social Foundations of Law

There are several important questions to ask both our politicians and ourselves as we seek to refine and further define an otherwise abstract commitment to substantive equality with which to replace our current formal version. As with many concepts of historic magnitude, some of the most significant questions to pose about equality have to do with how we should respond to evolutions in understanding and changes in aspiration for the term: ls a mere commitment to formal equality sufficient for a humane and modem state? How should the state respond to the fact that our society is increasingly one in which a privileged few command more resources than the struggling many, and individuals are born into and continue to experience disparities in well being that are built upon existing inequitable distributions of society\u27s resources? In the United States today, some live in real poverty and deprivation, while a few have more wealth than they could spend in ten lifetimes. Of course, there is also the vast majority, who view themselves as middle class. These Americans have homes, automobiles, and even small stock portfolios. Most of them, nonetheless, live in a state of insecurity. Given the way things are organized in our system of privatized and individualized responsibility, they are only a few paychecks, a catastrophic illness, or a divorce away from economic disintegration and despair. The insecurity and unfairness generated in the current political and economic organization of this society suggest that we should fashion a sense of equality that is more concerned with ultimate outcomes. In such a society, a more substantive notion of equality would warrant that the rewards that it and its resources produce are more equitably distributed among its members. This would be a society with some basic guarantees of social goods-a society that would not tolerate any person left behind-left without adequate resources to allow them and their children to succeed to the fullest extent possible