From Partners to Parents: The Second Revolution in Family Law (Book)

Abstract

This book charts the intellectual history that has taken us from partners to parents as the central focus of family regulation. The first section undertakes an intellectual survey that frames the four corners of the debate about the future of family. It starts with theorists Gary Becker, who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for extending economics to a realm of romance and altruism, and Susan Moller Okin, who replaces the economists' emphasis on efficiency with justice as the basis for critique. Becker and Okin, taken together, explain how changing marital roles guarantee the greater instability of the nuclear family. They differ on the continuing importance of specialized roles to family well-being. Cornell Law professor Martha Fineman and Clinton domestic policy advisor William Galston then examine the alternatives. In the midst of disagreement about everything else, both craft family policies premised on obligation toward children as the only coherent contemporary possibilities.

The middle third of the book examines the empirical evidence on which the debate is based. It begins by considering the historical research that links (and sometimes unlinks) family change to industrial organization, reviews the distinctive history of the African-American family, and places modern developments in perspective. It then focuses on what sense can be made of the sociological and psychological research that ties children's well-being to family form, considers the racial and class dynamics involved in family transformation, and weighs the implications for a renewed model of family obligation.

The final section links the intellectual debate to the legal developments. In many ways, the legal system has already implemented the most radical proposals by deregulating the relationship between husband and wife, eliminating the distinctions between marital and unmarital children, writing a detailed code of parental obligations that extends from child support to joint custody schedules to prohibitions on abuse, and changing the shape of Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This section considers whether, taken together, the reforms offer a coherent way of thinking about provision for children. The book concludes that, just as the older system relied on an integration of public regulation and private norms, so too will the success of the new era depend on popular acceptance of responsibility toward children. The unfinished revolution -- and a central focus of the gender wars that rage unabated -- is resolution of the terms on which partners need to relate to each other to make parenting work.

JEL Classification: K19