The New Family Freedom

In family law, “autonomy” has traditionally meant freedom from state interference in one’s intimate life. This Article describes an emergent, libertarian vision of autonomy as property rights that also demands freedom from other family members. This conception, “choice about obligations,” holds redistribution of resources between intimates to be illegitimate unless the richer party “chose” to take on financial obligations ex ante by ceremonially marrying or formally contracting. But as more people conduct their intimate lives outside these legal institutions, choice about obligations increasingly collides with another, more fundamental, family law principle: the imperative to “privatize dependency,” i.e., to redistribute resources between family members in lieu of publicly supporting those who cannot support themselves. This conflict is insoluble on its own terms and creates persistent doctrinal problems in the modern law of family obligations. Parentage law, cohabitant property-division claims, and alimony each present the clash between a richer party’s interest in avoiding “unchosen” family obligations and the state’s interest in avoiding responsibility for citizens’ material needs. Against the backdrop of scant collective support, the law denies the importance of freedom to privatize dependency in parent-child relationships and vindicates “choice” in adult relationships by requiring adults to self-support, all the while insisting that intimates “assumed the risk” of obligation or economic loss. Thus, despite attempts to dispel it through doctrinal workarounds, legal fictions, or willful ignorance, the tension remains. The incompatibility between choice about obligations and privatizing dependency also reveals a deep normative tension in the law, for both principles originate in the current neoliberal moment. Neoliberal commitments shape modern family law, but prove both incoherent and deficient as a framework for intimate relationships. As currently structured, family law fails to recognize and further the vital role that families play in meeting their members’ deepest human needs. To better conceptualize the rights and responsibilities attending intimacy, modern family law should rethink its approaches to both autonomy and dependency

Properties of Intimacy

Today, nearly nineteen million U.S. adults are cohabiting with an intimate partner. Yet family law continues to struggle with the question whether these unmarried partners should have relationship-based rights in one another’s property. Generally speaking, states answer “no.” Because cohabitants are not spouses, they’re treated like strangers. As a result, their property rights usually follow title, and richer partners tend to walk away with a large proportion of the property acquired during the relationship. This Article shows the “cohabitant problem” to be no anomaly, but rather the clearest manifestation of family law’s overarching structure. In marital property regimes as well as in cohabitant disputes, states and scholars have taken title as both a starting and a presumptive ending point, which means that assigning property rights in any other way is “redistribution” requiring special justification. This deferential approach to title limits family law’s ability to achieve sharing outcomes, not only between cohabitants, but also between spouses. Rather than bowing to title and then redistributing, family law should reconsider how it assigns property entitlements in the first instance. Nonfamily property law offers a promising model, for it often weighs intimacy in determining entitlements. In relationships marked by dependence, interdependence, and vulnerability—for example, those between neighbors, co-owners, and decedents and heirs—property rights do not always hold with the same force as they might against strangers. Instead, property law acknowledges the social facts of ongoing, hard-to-exit relationships by blunting the sharp edges of owners’ prerogatives. This approach, which I describe as instantiating a “spectrum of intimacy,” allows property law to recognize and support a broad range of close, complex relationships. Family law should adopt property law’s spectrum of intimacy to reshape marital property regimes and re-situate unmarried partners in the space between spouses and strangers. Just as property law permits multiple forms of joint ownership, family law should offer a menu of family statuses of which marriage is but one. For partners who do not elect a status, family law should apply a property-flavored equitable approach to distribution. By protecting sharing between both cohabitants and spouses, this approach reflects and honors the wide diversity of modern family relationships

Nonconsensual Family Obligations

Even as the pandemic has both highlighted and compounded the challenges many U.S. families face in meeting their members’ basic needs, efforts to expand public subsidies for caretaking have gained little traction. Scholars have identified many historical and practical reasons for Americans’ entrenched skepticism toward the welfare state. Ideas matter, too, and this Article uncovers and critiques one that works to limit collective financial responsibility for families: the conviction that family support obligations must be legitimated through consent. In family law, as in liberal political theory, consent works to reconcile state regulation with individual freedom. But because consent is a poor way to conceptualize relations of interdependence, consent-based ideas about what family members owe one another make family law doctrine less generous and justifiable than it could be. Such ideas also insulate citizens from financial obligations toward anyone’s family but their own. Consent-based legitimation endures in part because “consent” can bear different meanings unless it is precisely defined – work that family law scholars have only begun to undertake. Contributing to that project, this Article develops a taxonomy that identifies the distinct roles consent plays in justifying family obligations. It then uses that taxonomy to analyze how uncritical consent-based reasoning contributes to an incoherent body of doctrine that naturalizes economic inequality within and between families. To begin to address these problems, family law should incorporate additional principles beyond consent for justifying family support obligations. Adopting such a pluralist approach would allow family law to grapple with important normative questions directly and openly, contributing to more defensible (and potentially more egalitarian) doctrine. Recognizing what this Article calls “nonconsensual family obligations” is also the first step toward advocating for the collective responsibility to make the material inputs of family life available to all— rendering family support obligations both broader and more widely spread than we currently imagine them to be

The Productivity of Wh- Prompts in Child Forensic Interviews.

Child witnesses are often asked wh- prompts (what, how, why, who, when, where) in forensic interviews. However, little research has examined the ways in which children respond to different wh- prompts, and no previous research has investigated productivity differences among wh- prompts in investigative interviews. This study examined the use and productivity of wh- prompts in 95 transcripts of 4- to 13-year-olds alleging sexual abuse in child investigative interviews. What-how questions about actions elicited the most productive responses during both the rapport building and substantive phases. Future research and practitioner training should consider distinguishing among different wh- prompts.This research was supported in part by the Nuffield Foundation, Jacobs Foundation, an NICHD Grant HD047290, and an ESRC studentship.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/088626051562108

Wermer examples and currents

In this paper we give the first examples of positive closed currents in $\mathbb{C}^2$ with continuous potentials, vanishing self-intersection, and which are not laminar. More precisely, they are supported on sets "without analytic structure". The result is mostly interesting when the potential has regularity close to $C^2$, because laminarity is expected to hold in that case. We actually construct examples which are $C^{1,\alpha}$ for all $\alpha<1$.Comment: Minor modifications. Final version, to appear in GAF

The Biological Standard of Living in the two Germanies.

Physical stature is used as a proxy for the biological standard of living in the two Germanies before and after unification in an analysis of a cross-sectional sample (1998) of adult heights, as well as among military recruits of the 1990s. West Germans tended to be taller than East Germans throughout the period under consideration. Contrary to official proclamations of a classless society, there were substantial social differences in physical stature in East-Germany. Social differences in height were greater in the East among females, and less among males than in the West. The difficulties experienced by the East-German population after 1961 is evident in the increase in social inequality of physical stature thereafter, as well as in the increasing gap relative to the height of the West-German population. After unification, however, there is a tendency for East-German males, but not of females, to catch up with their West-German counterparts

MHC class II complexes sample intermediate states along the peptide exchange pathway

The presentation of peptide-MHCII complexes (pMHCIIs) for surveillance by T cells is a well-known immunological concept in vertebrates, yet the conformational dynamics of antigen exchange remain elusive. By combining NMR- detected H/D exchange with Markov modelling analysis of an aggregate of 275 microseconds molecular dynamics simulations, we reveal that a stable pMHCII spontaneously samples intermediate conformations relevant for peptide exchange. More specifically, we observe two major peptide exchange pathways: the kinetic stability of a pMHCII’s ground state defines its propensity for intrinsic peptide exchange, while the population of a rare, intermediate conformation correlates with the propensity of the HLA-DM-catalysed pathway. Helix-destabilizing mutants designed based on our model shift the exchange behaviour towards the HLA-DM-catalysed pathway and further allow us to conceptualize how allelic variation can shape an individual’s MHC restricted immune response

Counting Complex Disordered States by Efficient Pattern Matching: Chromatic Polynomials and Potts Partition Functions

Counting problems, determining the number of possible states of a large system under certain constraints, play an important role in many areas of science. They naturally arise for complex disordered systems in physics and chemistry, in mathematical graph theory, and in computer science. Counting problems, however, are among the hardest problems to access computationally. Here, we suggest a novel method to access a benchmark counting problem, finding chromatic polynomials of graphs. We develop a vertex-oriented symbolic pattern matching algorithm that exploits the equivalence between the chromatic polynomial and the zero-temperature partition function of the Potts antiferromagnet on the same graph. Implementing this bottom-up algorithm using appropriate computer algebra, the new method outperforms standard top-down methods by several orders of magnitude, already for moderately sized graphs. As a first application, we compute chromatic polynomials of samples of the simple cubic lattice, for the first time computationally accessing three-dimensional lattices of physical relevance. The method offers straightforward generalizations to several other counting problems.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure