American Constitutionalism, Marriage, and the Family PDF Download

Author: Patrick N. Cain
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149852818X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This edited volume in American constitutionalism places the Supreme Court’s declaration of same-sex marriage rights in U.S. v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) within the context of the Court’s developing understanding of the legal and social status of marriage and the family. Leading scholars in the fields of political science, law, and religion examine the roots of the Court’s affirmation of same-sex rights in a number of areas related to marriage and the family including the right to marry, equality and happiness in marriage, the right to privacy, freedom of association, property rights, parental power, and reproductive rights. Taken together, these essays evaluate the extent to which the Court’s recent marriage rulings both break with and derive from the competing principles of American Constitutionalism.

Author: Mark E. Brandon
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700619232
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In two canonical decisions of the 1920s—Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters—the Supreme Court announced that family (including certain relations within it) was an institution falling under the Constitution’s protective umbrella. Since then, proponents of “family values” have claimed that a timeless form of family—nuclear and biological—is crucial to the constitutional order. Mark Brandon’s new book, however, challenges these claims. Brandon addresses debates currently roiling America—the regulation of procreation, the roles of women, the education of children, divorce, sexuality, and the meanings of marriage. He also takes on claims of scholars who attribute modern change in family law to mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions upholding privacy. He shows that the “constitutional” law of family has much deeper roots. Offering glimpses into American households across time, Brandon looks at the legal and constitutional norms that have aimed to govern those households and the lives within them. He argues that, well prior to the 1960s, the nature of families in America had been continually changing—especially during western expansion, but also in the founding era. He further contends that the monogamous nuclear family was codified only at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to Mormon polygamy, communal experiments, and Native American households. Brandon discusses the evolution of familial jurisprudence as applied to disputes over property, inheritance, work, reproduction, the status of women and children, the regulation of sex, and the legal limits to and constitutional significance of marriage. He shows how the Supreme Court’s famous decisions in the latter part of the twentieth century were largely responses to societal change, and he cites a wide range of cases that offer fresh insight into the ways the legal system responded to various forms of family life. More than a historical overview, the book also considers the development of same-sex marriage as a political and legal issue in our time. States of Union is a groundbreaking volume that explains how family came to be “in” the Constitution, what it has meant for family to be constitutionally significant, and what the implications of that significance are for the constitutional order and for families.

Author: Sanford N. Katz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199264346
Category : Domestic relations
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This volume examines the state of family law in America. Among its themes is the tension between individual autonomy and governmental regulation in all aspects of family law. It examines both conventional and new definitions of formal and informal domestic relationships.

Author: Allan C. Carlson
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412808987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
The institution of marriage has become perilously weak in America. Changes in the law over the past three decades, such as the spread of no-fault divorce and broad acquiescence to cultures of divorce and intentional childlessness, have stripped traditional marriage of important legal supports. Half of all marriages end in divorce and just as many are childless. Conjugal America seeks to recapture the real purposes of marriage and the unchanging nature of this most vital and fundamental human institution. Confronting contemporary issues and drawing heavily on the natural and social sciences, each chapter also reaches into the past to find truths grounded in human experience. Carlson reexamines the basic bond of marriage to procreation, showing that this tie has been no less than the foundation of the unwritten sexual constitution of Western civilization. He also shows how the Gnostic heresy, which despises procreation, posed a stark danger to the early Christian movement and to "the sexual constitution" of our own time as well. He then dissects claims regarding the "evolution of marriage," showing that true marriage always represents the vital connection of the sexual with the economic. Carlson explores the political nature of marriage showing, why every ambitious totalitarian government seeks above all to destroy marriage, and why the true marital bond actually stands for liberty. He concludes by arguing for the necessity of marriage policy. Because both the nature of the centralizing state and the pressures of modernity have altered family circumstances, new protections and encouragements to marriage are now imperative. Conjugal America will be central to the new debate on marriage and its purposes. This book sees the current moment as an opportunity to revitalize a necessary institution that has recently been abused and neglected and reinstate it as the primary source of commitment and care in the modern world.

Author: Douglas NeJaime
Publisher: Aspen Publishing
ISBN: 1543823211
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1152

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Book Description
Family Law in a Changing America is a new casebook that highlights law and family patterns as they are now, not as they were decades ago. By focusing on key changes in family life, the casebook attends to rising equality and inequality within and among families. The law, formally at least, accords more equality and autonomy than ever before, having repudiated hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexuality. Yet, as our society has grown more economically unequal, so too have family patterns diverged—with marriage and marital child-rearing becoming a mark of privilege. A number of developments—mass incarceration, the privatization of care, and reproductive technologies—have also contributed to disparities based on race, class, and gender. The casebook reflects the law’s continuing emphasis on marriage, but also treats nonmarital families as central. Rather than privilege the marital heterosexual family, the casebook organizes the presentation of the law around 1) adult relationships and 2) parent-child relationships. Professors and students will benefit from: Text that includes dramatic changes in family patterns in contemporary society, including: declining marriage rates, with differential rates based on race and class; increasing rates of nonmarital cohabitation and nonmarital parenting; the use of assisted reproduction and its challenge to biological understandings of parentage; tensions between women’s increasing education and employment and the perseverance of the gendered division of labor in families; the inclusion of same-sex couples in marriage and parenthood An approach that decenters the marital heterosexual family and instead is structured around the general topics of adult relationships and parent-child relationships Focus on the scope of family law, including extensive coverage of crucial sites of family regulation, such as the child welfare system, that are traditionally neglected Emphasis on multiple modes of legal interpretation (common law, constitutional, statutory) and multiple actors in the legal system (judges, legislators, lawyers, experts, social workers) Practical problems and exercises, often based on actual cases or events, that illuminate the gaps, tensions, and implications of existing doctrine; some of the problems include postscripts explaining how the issue was resolved by a court or legislature An approach that draws on more recent cases and cutting-edge issues and that includes extensive coverage of assisted reproduction (including IVF, surrogacy, and gamete donation), parentage (including intentional parenthood, functional parenthood, and multi-parent arrangements), adoption, child welfare, and family support

Author: Peggy Cooper Davis
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809016079
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In a powerful challenge to the belief that the Constitution has nothing to do with the individual freedoms that comprise family rights, Peggy Cooper Davis argues in Neglected Stories that the constitutional amendments after the Civil War reflect a profound appreciation of the political, social, and personal worth of family autonomy. She draws upon what she calls the "motivating stories" of the Fourteenth Amendment to show that the Reconstruction legislators who sponsored it understood family rights as aspects of liberty that were fundamental to the proper definition of freedom and citizenship. This new understanding of family rights developed as men and women - black and white, Southerners and Northerners - came to appreciate the enormity of slavery's denial, even destruction, of family life. Davis also explores the "doctrinal stories" the Supreme Court has told to justify or strike down restrictions on liberty with respect to work, marriage, procreation, parenting, and sexuality and family planning - and the stories of the litigants who wanted to live, work, marry, love, and parent as they chose. These "neglected stories" are woven together in a strong new constitutional argument that gives us at long last a framework in which we can have sensible social and political debate about just what we mean when we say "family values."

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on the Constitution
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Author: Peter J. Riga
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780934355070
Category : Domestic relations
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description

Author: Joanna L. Grossman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839777
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
A comprehensive social history of families and family law in twentieth-century America Inside the Castle is a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman show how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with their own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life. The story of family law in the twentieth century is complex. This was the century that said goodbye to common-law marriage and breach-of-promise lawsuits. This was the century, too, of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, of gay rights and cohabitation. Marriage lost its powerful monopoly over legitimate sexual behavior. Couples who lived together without marriage now had certain rights. Gay marriage became legal in a handful of jurisdictions. By the end of the century, no state still prohibited same-sex behavior. Children in many states could legally have two mothers or two fathers. No-fault divorce became cheap and easy. And illegitimacy lost most of its social and legal stigma. These changes were not smooth or linear—all met with resistance and provoked a certain amount of backlash. Families took many forms, some of them new and different, and though buffeted by the winds of change, the family persisted as a central institution in society. Inside the Castle tells the story of that institution, exploring the ways in which law tried to penetrate and control this most mysterious realm of personal life.

Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights
Publisher: Amicus
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Making Shelter, shows readers how to prevent and deal with a large range of hazards in the wild. With clear, stepbystep instructions, it explains what to do if you are injured, lost or hungry, or faced with extreme weather conditions, dangerous animals, or disasters. Additional features include: a table of contents, glossary, index, color photographs, quizzes, and recommended websites for further exploration.