Are You My Mother?: Conceptualizing Children’s Identity Rights in Transracial Adoptions

I. Adoption and the Clash of Rights Perspectives Adoption law in the United States, depending on whom you ask, is either at a turning point or hopelessly gridlocked. 1 Many issues seem to defy consensus. Media reports of high profile adoption cases 2 have attracted enormous attention, not only because of their inherent drama, but also because they implicate highly contested definitions of what makes a family. Many of the most volatile adoption issues are couched in terms of rights: the birth mother\u27s right to confidentiality; the adoptive parent\u27s right to be treated equally without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation; the rights of a racial, ethnic, or national community to custody and control of children born into that community; the adult adoptee\u27s right to information about her origins; the right of unwed fathers to veto the birth mother\u27s adoption decision, and so on, ad infinitum. These clashes of rights highlight the tensions between claims of blood and nurture, biological and social connection, and individual and communal definitions of self. Of all the debates, the furor over racial matching in adoption is perhaps the most problematic for American legal culture. Most recently in the United States, Congress enacted the Multiethnic Placement Act (MPA). 3 Originally designed to avoid delay stemming from reluctance to place children in homes with parents of another race or ethnicity, the MPA has become a battleground for competing visions of individual and group identity and has revived longstanding controversies about ..

Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, and Practice to Life

I share Judge Edwards\u27 concern about the health of legal education and about lawyers as a force in society. I differ, however, in defining the sickness and prescribing the cure, at least when it comes to teaching. In my view, we need to integrate, not to dichotomize and polarize further, the practical and the impractical, the doctrinal and the theoretical. His critique, and my intuitive response to it, challenged me to examine and articulate where we disagree, based on what I have learned in my five years in the classroom and what it is I hope to accomplish in my teaching. Judge Edwards\u27 remarks also heightened my sense that teaching, not scholarship, may be the endangered activity and that a perception of disjunction between theory, doctrine, and practice impedes the evolution of more inclusive styles of teaching