FEMINISM & LAW WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Professor Laura Rosenbury
Washington University in St. Louis Law School
Friends with Benefits?
Friday, January 18, 2008
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely friendship. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without. Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways in which the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have considered whether family law should recognize care provided outside of the home, and no scholar has considered whether family law should recognize the care provided and received by friends. Part II turns to friendship, considering the practices of people who self-identify as friends and the ways that such practices are already influenced by the law’s maintenance of a divide between friendship and family. That divide amounts to state support of the types of domestic caregiving that traditionally played vital roles in maintaining state-supported patriarchy and that still largely follow gendered patterns today. Family law thereby reinforces traditional gender role expectations rather than alleviating them. Part III then explores how simultaneous legal recognition of friendship and family could lead to greater opportunities to structure life free from state-supported gender role expectations. By supporting more pluralistic personal relationships and conceptions of care, family law could transform not just friendship and marriage, but gender itself.
Professor Rosenbury’s research and teaching focuses on the law of everyday life: work, family, sex and death. She is particularly interested in how the law may influence seemingly private relationships and conduct. Her forthcoming article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, entitled “Between Home and School,” examines these issues in the context of childrearing. That article was selected for presentation at the 2006 Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum as the best paper in the family law category. Professor Rosenbury joined the law school in the fall of 2002. In 2006 she was named the Professor of the Year. Before joining the faculty, she served as an associate in the litigation department at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York and as an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law. She graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College with an A.B. in Women’s Studies and received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was primary editor of the law review. She clerked for Judge Carol Bagley Amon, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, from 1997-1998, and for Judge Dennis Jacobs, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, from 1999-2000. In addition to her research and teaching interests, Professor Rosenbury has practiced in the areas of criminal, antitrust, securities, and consumer law. She serves on the board of Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD, Inc.), a national nonprofit organization that seeks to protect children from abusive religious and cultural practices, especially religion-based medical neglect. A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at
n.gulezko@utoronto.ca 