This book will discuss the interplay of norms and families from a number of perspectives. It will tie theoretical and empirical observations to subjects of current law reform as varied as cohabitation, custody, grandparent visitation, payment for household work and domestic violence. Relevant...

In a recent series of opinions authored by Justice Stevens, the Court has recognized that children may have independent religious rights, and that these may be in conflict with their parents'. The questions for this piece are whether considering children's rights independently is a good thing...

Davis v. Davis appears in many property books as well as some casebooks about family law. It features property rights in unique goods, and stimulates discussion about whether embryos should be the subject of court decisions, much less market transactions. Davis touches on ideas of...

Today, there is consensus that the current system of calculating and enforcing support obligations does not work well for disadvantaged families, most of which are nonmarital. Nonmarital children are less likely to have support orders established than marital children, and they are much less...

While divorcing couples in the United States have been studied for many years, separating unmarried couples and their children have proven more difficult to analyze. Recently there have been successful longitudinal ethnographic and survey-based studies. This piece uses documents from a single...

This paper addresses implications for urban neighborhoods of two dramatic shifts in the American educational landscape: (1) the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods, and (2) the rise of charter schools. In previous studies, we linked Catholic school closures to...

A child support guideline is a formula used to calculate support payments based on a few family characteristics. Guidelines began replacing court awarded support payments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were later mandated by the federal government in 1988. Two fundamentally different...

This paper represents the second stage of an effort to test the implications of a dramatic shift in the American educational landscape, namely, the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. In a previous study, we used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago...

Though married women have steadily increased their labor force activity, most continue to do the bulk of the housework. However, due to increases in life expectancy and declines in fertility, homemaking is no longer a lifetime career for women as a group. Without a wife who specializes in...

Our previous work has suggested that the closure of Catholic elementary schools generates disorder and suppresses social cohesion in urban neighborhoods — findings that support the conclusion that Catholic elementary schools create neighborhood social capital. We extend our inquiry here by...