Courses

Comparative Family Law
Fall Term, Block E
M, T 1:15pm – 2:45pm

This course will examine the making of modern Egyptian family law and will compare it with the making of modern American family law. This will cause us to study the sources of Islamic law, Egypt’s legal encounter with the West during the colonial and mandate era, and then wave after wave of reform understood to be necessary for decolonization, modernization and ‘traditionalization.’ The distinctive place of family law, the distinctive history of courts, professionals and codes in its development, will be important subjects for us. The second half of the course will involve a series of comparisons between Egyptian and US family law, in the course of which will also compare sociological and anthropological approaches with more formal legal ones, the idea of ‘modernization’ in the West and the East, and the ideological investments that precondition our understanding of the comparison. We will close with reflections on the comparative project generally.

The course is designed to be accessible to students who have never studies Islamic, postcolonial, or American law, or family law. Each week we will spend one day learning the legal rules, and the next reflecting on the methodological, legal, political, and interpretive problems involved in their comparative study. L.L.M.’s interested in family law and/or comparative law in colonial/postcolonial contexts are particularly welcome.

The course materials will be those established by Professor Lama Abu-Odeh for her course on Comparative Family Law (Georgetown University Law Center).

In order to focus all of our attention on discussion of the materials there will be no use of laptop computers in class (though of course exceptions will be made, through the usual process, for students with disabilities).

Photocopied materials. Students will write short papers throughout the semester.

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Family Law
Fall term, Block G
M,T,W 3pm-4:20pm

This course comes in four parts. The first examines US family law as a private welfare system. We will concentrate here on the ways in which marriage intersects with various property regimes, regulatory systems, and contract law, and then we will compare it with its alternatives (common law marriage, civil unions, ‘covenant marriage’ regimes, cohabitation regimes, singleness, and sheer nonrecognition of legal relatedness) also seen as distributive regimes. We will then turn to an examination of the ‘constitutional family’: the right to privacy in sex and reproduction; the right to privacy for parents raising children; the right to marry; the problem of equality in family law; and the distinctive constitutional status of nonmarital fathers. We will then study divorce. Finally, we will compare the interstate enforcement problems that arose when fault divorce was the majority rule but some states allowed no fault divorce, with those arising today, when some jurisdictions do and many don’t recognize same-sex marriage.

Photocopies materials and a casebook, Harris and Teitelbaum, Family Law. The examination will consist of a 15-page paper responding to questions distributed in class.

In order to focus all of our attention on discussion of the material there will no use of laptop computers in class (though, of course, exemptions will be made, through the usual process, for students with disabilities). Students are encouraged to consider enrolling in the course with a clinical component. Students who wish to enroll in the class with a clinical component must do so through the Office of the Clinical and Pro Bono Programs.

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Women and the Law
Fall term, Block F
W, Th 1:15pm-2:45pm
With Visiting Professor Libby Adler

This course will be an inquiry into the relationship of the law to women’s bodies, women as workers and women as family members. Of necessity this will involve us also in the study of the relationship of law to men, gender and sexuality in these domains. Our survey will touch on a range of doctrinal fields, including family law, constitutional law, anti-discrimination law and criminal law as we discuss topics ranging from prostitution/sex work to domestic violence, from reproduction to rape. We will read case law as well as commentary from a range of feminist and non-feminist perspectives with the goal of deepening our appreciation of law’s impact on women; the various ways in which legal institutions manage everyone’s gender, and (to the extent we can) the ways in which ideological struggles over women’s roles in society and gender more pervasively have contributed to the legal institutions we now have. The course will be co-taught by Professor Janet Halley, author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton 2006) and by Visiting Professor Libby Adler, co-editor of the forthcoming fourth edition of Women and the Law (currently in its third edition by Greenberg, Minow and Roberts and originally edited by Mary Joe Frug) and Professor of Law at Northeastern University.

Course materials will consist of Women and the Law and Professor Adler’s supplements to it. Examination will be by last-class take-home examination.