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Family Law in a Changing America, Second Edition

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Authors
  • Douglas NeJaime
  • R. Richard Banks
  • Joanna L Grossman 
  • Suzanne A. Kim
Series / Aspen Casebook Series
BOOKMARK
Book length
1050 pages
Publication Date
2024-02-28
Edition
Second Edition
Description
Table of contents
Preface

Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on Casebook Connect, including academic lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities. Access also includes practice questions, an outline tool, and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes.



Family Law in a Changing America 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; 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.

New to the Second Edition:
  • Updated coverage on reproductive justice and abortion access
  • Expanded and updated and coverage of the Indian Child Welfare Act
  • Updated coverage on the child welfare system and a focus on debates over abolition

Professors and students will benefit from:
  • Text that includes dramatic changes in family patterns, including declining marriage rates, with differential rates based on race and class; increasing rates of nonmarital cohabitation and nonmarital parenting; tensions between women's increasing education and employment and the perseverance of the gendered division of labor in families
  • 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 that are traditionally given short shrift
  • 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 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 the rights of unmarried partners, reproductive justice, assisted reproduction; parentage (including intentional parenthood, functional parenthood, and multi-parent arrangements), adoption (including open adoption, transracial adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act), the child welfare system, and family support
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About the authors
Douglas NeJaime
Professor
Yale Law School

Douglas NeJaime is Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches in the areas of family law, legal ethics, law and sexuality, and constitutional law. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2017, NeJaime was Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he served as Faculty Director of the Williams Institute, a research institute on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. He has also served on the faculties at UC Irvine School of Law and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and was Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

NeJaime is the co-author of Family Law in a Changing America (with Ralph Richard Banks, Joanna Grossman, and Suzanne Kim), Cases and Materials on Sexuality, Gender Identity, and the Law (with Carlos Ball, Jane Schacter, and William Rubenstein), and Ethical Lawyering: Legal and Professional Responsibilities in the Practice of Law (with Paul Hayden). His recent scholarship includes: “Answering the Lochner Objection: The Democracy-Reinforcing Role of Courts in Liberty and Equality Cases,” 96 N.Y.U. Law Review (forthcoming 2021); “The Constitution of Parenthood,” 72 Stanford Law Review 261 (2020); “The Nature of Parenthood,” 126 Yale Law Journal 2260 (2017); “Marriage Equality and the New Parenthood,” 129 Harvard Law Review 1185 (2016); “Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics,” 124 Yale Law Journal 2516 (2015), with Reva Siegel; and “Before Marriage: The Unexplored History of Nonmarital Recognition and Its Relationship to Marriage,” 102 California Law Review 87 (2014).

On three occasions, NeJaime has received the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best sexual orientation legal scholarship published in the previous year. He has also been the recipient of the YLW Faculty Excellence Award at Yale Law School, the Women’s Law Association teaching award at Harvard Law School, the Professor of the Year Award at UC Irvine School of Law, and the Excellence in Teaching Award at Loyola Law School.

NeJaime has been a leader on national efforts to reform parentage laws to accommodate families that feature nonbiological parent-child relationships, including those formed by same-sex couples and through assisted reproduction. NeJaime led the effort to pass comprehensive parentage reform in Connecticut, serving as the principal drafter of the Connecticut Parentage Act, Public Act 21-15, which passed with near-unanimous support in both chambers of the legislature and was signed by Governor Ned Lamont in 2021.

Ralph Richard Banks

Ralph Richard Banks is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a professor, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is the Founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, an initiative that aims to confront and counter the polarization that plagues American society through an analysis of contentious racial issues free from the orthodoxies of Left and Right.

Professor Banks is the co-author of two leading law school casebooks, Racial Justice and the Law: Cases and Materials (2016) (with co-editors Kim Forde-Mazrui, Guy Uriel Charles and Cristina Rodriguez) and Family Law in a Changing America (2nd ed. 2024) (with co-editors Douglas NeJaime, Joanna Grossman, and Suzanne Kim). He is also the author of the trade book Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline affects Everyone (2011; paperback 2012), described by the Los Angeles Times as a “must read,” by the New York Times as “important” and by the Wilson Quarterly (the official publication of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) as one of the Top Ten Books of 2011. The book has been featured by a wide range of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Essence magazine, The Village Voice, Time, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and also NPR (local and national) CNN, ABC News/Nightline, The View, and Fox News, among many others. His forthcoming book, The Big Sort: How College Can Make or Break the American Dream, will be published in 2025.

At Stanford, Professor Banks teaches Constitutional Law, Family Law and a variety of courses related to race, law and inequality. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1998 after clerking for federal judge Barrington D. Parker, serving as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School and practicing law at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers. He graduated from Harvard Law School with honors and received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Stanford University.

Joanna Grossman
Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Professor Grossman is the inaugural Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law. After graduating with distinction from Stanford Law School, Professor Grossman began her career as a clerk for Ninth Circuit Judge William A. Norris. She also worked as staff counsel at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C. as a recipient of the Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship. In addition, she practiced law at the Washington, D.C. firm of Williams & Connolly LLP.

Prior to coming to SMU Dedman School of Law, Professor Grossman taught at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University where she served as the Sidney and Walter Siben Distinguished Professor of Family Law. Professor Grossman writes extensively on sex discrimination and workplace equality, with a particular focus on issues such as sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. Her book, NINE TO FIVE: HOW GENDER, SEX AND SEXUALITY CONTINUE TO DEFINE THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE (Cambridge, 2016), provides a lively and accessible discussion of contemporary cases and events that show gender continues to define the work experience in both predictable and surprising ways.

She is also an expert in family law, especially parentage law and the state regulation of marriage. She is co-author (with Lawrence M. Friedman) of INSIDE THE CASTLE: LAW AND THE FAMILY IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN (Princeton University Press, 2011), a comprehensive social history of U.S. family law. She has published articles in Stanford Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and the Yale Journal on Law and Feminism, among other places. Grossman is the co-editor of GENDER EQUALITY: DIMENSIONS OF WOMEN'S EQUAL CITIZENSHIP (Cambridge University Press, 2009), an interdisciplinary anthology that explores persistent gaps between formal commitments to gender equality and the reality of women’s lives, and FAMILY LAW IN NEW YORK (Carolina Academic Press, 2015). She is also a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her work on parentage law.
Product Information
Edition
Second Edition
Publication date
2024-02-28
Copyright Year
2024
Pages
1050
Print + eBook
9798889066033
eBook
9798889066040
LLPOD
9798892072298
Audiobook
9798899630316
eBook + Audiobook
9798899634307
Subject
Family Law
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