Family Law Reimagined

by Jill Elaine Hasday

Overview

One of the law’s most important and far-reaching roles is to govern family life and family members. Family law decides who counts as kin, how family relationships are created and dissolved, and what legal rights and responsibilities come with marriage, parenthood, sibling ties, and other family bonds. Yet despite its significance, the field remains remarkably understudied and poorly understood both within and outside the legal community.

Family Law Reimagined is the first book to evaluate the canonical narratives, examples, and ideas that legal decisionmakers repeatedly invoke to explain family law and its governing principles. These stories contend that family law is exclusively local, that it repudiates market principles, that it has eradicated the imprint of common law doctrines which subordinated married women, that it is dominated by contract rules permitting individuals to structure their relationships as they choose, and that it consistently prioritizes children’s interests over parents’ rights. In this book, Jill Elaine Hasday reveals how family law’s canon misdescribes the reality of family law, misdirects attention away from the actual problems that family law confronts, and misshapes the policies that legal authorities pursue. She demonstrates how much of the “common sense” that decisionmakers expound about family law actually makes little sense.

Family Law Reimagined uncovers and critiques the family law canon and outlines a path to reform. Challenging conventional answers and asking questions that judges and lawmakers routinely overlook, it calls on us to reimagine family law.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674281288
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2014
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jill Elaine Hasday is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Family Law Canon 1

I Family Law Exceptionalism 15

1 Federalism and the Family 17

2 Family Law and Economic Exchange 67

II The Family Law Canon's Progress Narratives 95

3 Progress Narratives for Adults 97

4 A Progress Narrative for Children 133

III What's Missing from the Family Law Canon? 159

5 Sibling Ties and Other Noncanonical Family Relationships 161

6 Family Law for the Poor 195

Conclusion: Recasting the Family Law Canon 221

Notes 229

Acknowledgments 299

Index 301

Editorial Reviews

Family Law Reimagined offers a clear-eyed vision of what family law is, what it is not, and where it might be headed.

Child and Family Law Journal - Laurie S. Kohn

Family Law Reimagined explores the inaccuracies of the narratives that shape family law. Jill Hasday’s argument is high-minded, yet deeply grounded in the reality of law and the reality of families.

Joanna L. Grossman

This book is a tremendously ambitious attempt to identify the basic principles governing family law, used on the bench and in family law classes. It is beautifully and lucidly written, meticulously researched, and the most sophisticated theoretical assessment of the current state of family law.

Maxine Eichner