Family Law II: Parent-Child Relationships

This course will examine the legal regulation of the parent-child relationship. The law used to be much simpler than it is today. The law treated marriage as the near exclusive setting for the rearing of children, defining the woman who gave birth to the child was the mother, and the man to whom she was married as the father. In recent decades, that simple legal principle has collapsed under the weight of social and technological change. The central social change is the reconfiguration of marriage and the multiplicity of settings in which children are raised. The advent of same sex marriage and same sex couples undermine longstanding assumptions about the legal definition of parent. And the fact that 4 in every 10 children are born to unmarried couples, and that nearly half of all married couples will divorce (often with either or both partners remarrying) introduce a dizzying array of possible family configurations. Advances in genetic testing complicate matters further, by allowing biological parents to be identified with near certainty. Thus, there is less reason to treat a woman's husband as her child's father. Many couples use reproductive technologies involving the donation of sperm, the donation of eggs or even the use of a surrogate mother to gestate the child. The use of such technologies can result in many adults having some form of tie to the child, a situation that has prompted some jurisdictions to recognize the possibilities of more than 2 parents! In sum, nonmarital, nonbiological, and same-sex parenting have become central, rather than peripheral features of the familial landscape. These changes highlight provocative and fundamental inquiries: What, exactly, does, and should, make one a parent in the view of the law? And how should the state allocate rights and responsibilities, related to custody, financial support and visitation, as families fracture and reconfigure? Elements used in grading: Participation, Exam.