Eskridge, J., concurring in the judgment.

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-188
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
American Family ◽  
Gay Couples ◽  
Raising Children ◽  
Lesbian And Gay

We struggle in this case with the application of equal protection principles to evolving American family law. The challengers—committed lesbian and gay couples, many of them raising children—want the states of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee to recognize their existing committed family relationships as civil marriages. The states respond that these petitions ask this Court to ...

scholarly journals A ‘Divorce Blueprint’? The Use of Heteronormative Strategies in Addressing Economic Inequalities on Civil Partnership Dissolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (02) ◽  
pp. 267-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Bendall
Keyword(s):  
Family Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Gay Couples ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
What Works ◽  
Legal Implications ◽  
Marital Breakdown ◽  
Relationship Breakdown ◽  
Gendered Expectations

AbstractThis article will explore data obtained through interviews with UK family law practitioners and clients with experience of financial relief on formalised same-sex relationship breakdown. It will focus on questions around how solicitors have approached and argued their dissolution cases (and the extent to which they have drawn upon heteronormative arguments and case law), and whether both they and the clients believed that civil partnerships are, and should be, treated similarly to marriages. The discussion will examine the different understandings of ‘equality’ employed, and question the ways that the participants relied on ideas of sameness and difference. It will be argued that the solicitors placed particular stress on sameness, and that heteronormative constructs of gendered inequalities have been transplanted into same-sex cases, in a system where practitioners’ submissions are based on ‘what works.’ This is despite the fact that lesbian and gay couples do not map onto the ‘template’ under which the parties have been subjected to different gendered expectations. Conversely, the clients were less willing to take on the full legal implications associated with (heterosexual) marital breakdown and less receptive of the solicitors ‘translating’ their matters to pigeonhole them into the existing framework.

scholarly journals Forty Years of Family Law: A Retrospective

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 611
Author(s):  
Patrick Parkinson
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Parental Rights ◽  
Heterosexual Couples ◽  
Gay Couples ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Domestic Partnerships

This article presents a thematic retrospective of the past 40 years of family law in terms of the international landscape in developed countries. It examines three questions: First, whatever happened to marriage? While once marriage was central to family formation, it is no longer. Indeed, heterosexual couples have never been less interested in the idea of marriage. Secondly, whatever happened to divorce? The nature of divorce has fundamentally changed in the last forty years, largely as a consequence of the recognition that while intimate domestic partnerships may come to an end, parenthood is, for the most part, indissoluble. The ties that bind parents together remain important long after the adult relationship has ended. Thirdly, whatever happened to parenthood? Legal parenthood has become vastly more complicated than in the mid-1970s. One reason for this is the revolution in artificial reproduction techniques. A second reason is that lesbian and gay couples have, in increasing numbers, sought to raise children and demanded recognition of parental rights which are not based on genetic parenthood. These changes have had a profound impact upon modern family law.

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