What Is Family Law?: a Genealogy Part II
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What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Janet Halley, What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II, 23 Yale J.L. & Human. 189 (2011). Published Version http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol23/iss2/1/ Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12991692 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 23 | Issue 2 Article 1 5-8-2013 What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II Janet Halley Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Halley, Janet (2011) "What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II," Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities: Vol. 23: Iss. 2, Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol23/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized administrator of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Halley: What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II Articles What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II Janet Halley INTRODUCTION This Article offers a genealogy of domestic relations law (later renamed family law). It comes in two Parts. Part I is an account of how it emerged as a distinct field in American law in the latter half of the nineteenth century.' This Part, Part II, is an account of its successive transformations * Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Thanks to Amy J. Cohen, Glenn Cohen, Lisa Kelly, Duncan Kennedy, Frank Sander, Mark Tushnet, and Philomila Tsoukala for help with many aspects of the research. Thanks to David Worthington, Janet Katz, and the staff of Harvard Law Library Special Collections team for help with rare materials; and special thanks to FRIDA for making the research on all other fronts possible. Kristi Jobson was a wonderful research assistant. Thanks also to the Up Against Family Law Exceptionalism conference for the context of this work, to the Harvard Law School Faculty Workshop for excellent questions, to the HLS Family Law Lunch for help with the ideas, and to my Family Law students over the years for tolerating a lot of curricular experimentation as I tried to harvest the lessons of this investigation for them, and to distill the lessons I learned from them for this investigation. All errors of fact and judgment are mine alone. 1. Janet Halley, What is Family Law?: A Genealogy: Part 1, 23 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 1 (2011) [hereinafter Halley, What is Family Law?: Part 1]. 189 Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2011 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 23 [2011], Iss. 2, Art. 1 190 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 23:189 over the course of the twentieth century. I argue that domestic relations/family law did not always exist; rather, it was invented, and the ideological implications of that act of creation remain embedded in the field today. The central idea which, I argue, recurrently characterizes the field is that the family and its law are the opposites of the market and its law. Born in the middle of the nineteenth century as the notorious status/contract distinction, it has shown amazing powers of resilience, surviving three highly intentional and collectively organized attacks and gathering to itself new ideological and practical implications as the presuppositions about law that permeate legal consciousness have changed and changed again over time. The idea that the family and its law are the opposites of the market and its law is just one form of family law exceptionalism (FLE).2 But it is a crucial one: it travelled the globe in the middle of the nineteenth century, originating in the thought of the immensely influential jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny and diffusing, along with capitalism and colonialism, all around the world. 3 It became a fit vessel for the ideologies of laissez faire and the separate spheres when they emerged. All of this was a product of classical legal thought (CLT), which, as Duncan Kennedy shows in an article from which this one draws its basic historical template,4 venerated contract as the legal space in which to maximize space for the will of the parties, and venerated family law as its opposite, the space for the untrammeled will of the state imposing ascriptive statuses saturated with duty. Savigny also taught that contract law was universal, while family law gave voice to the spirit of the people, which was inevitably local. This formulation became an apt explanation for the development of a transnational body of law governing commerce and a 2. For a fuller statement of the vast range of meanings that have accumulated around the idea that the family and its law are exceptional, see J. Halley & Kerry Rittich, Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law: Genealogies and Contemporary Studies ofFamily Law Exceptionalism, 58 AM. J. COMP. L. 753 (2010) [hereinafter Halley & Rittich, CriticalDirections]. 3. For an account of Savigny's family law/contract law distinction and his influence, see Duncan Kennedy, Savigny's Family/PatrimonyDistinction and Its Place in the Global Genealogy of Classical Legal Thought, 56 AM. J. COMP. L. 811 (2010) [hereinafter Kennedy, Savigny's Distinction]. Kennedy construes FRIEDRICH CARL VON SAVIGNY, SYSTEM OF THE MODERN ROMAN LAW (Hyperion Press 1979) (William Holloway trans., 1867). See also Halley & Rittich, CriticalDirections, supra note 2, at 757-58, 771-75. 4. Duncan Kennedy, Three GlobalizationsofLaw and Legal Thought: 1850-2000, in THE NEW LAW AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL (David Trubek & Alvaro Santos eds. 2006) [herinafter Kennedy, Three Globalizations]. The same basic periodization receives different explanations in Ugo Mattei, Why the Wind Changed IntellectualLeadership in Western Law, 42 AM. J. COMP. L. 195 (1994). http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol23/iss2/1 2 Halley: What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II 2011] Halley 191 complementary deference to national difference with respect to the family and was widely deployed in colonial as well as postcolonial nationalist projects.I Kennedy dates CLT as a global phenomenon to the period from 1850 to 1914. It has never entirely disappeared; instead, its ideas broke up from the systematic, conceptualist, abstract armature which CLT eventually built for imagining all of law, becoming fragments which survived into two large subsequent forms of legal consciousness which succeeded it. My argument in this Part of this Article is that FLE in its form as the status/contract, family/contract, family/market distinction is one such durable fragment. The two subsequent forms of legal consciousness which Kennedy identifies as spreading throughout the world in globalizations of legal thought spanning the twentieth century are, first, "the social," emerging by 1900 and losing its grip on legal minds by 19686; and second, the era of conflicting considerations, which I will dub concon, emerging after World War II and persisting today.7 Here is how Kennedy introduces these two successive but also overlapping brainwaves: Between 1900 and 1968, what globalized was The Social, . a way of thinking without an essence, but with, as an important trait, preoccupation with rethinking law as a purposive activity, as a regulatory mechanism that could and should facilitate the evolution of social life in accordance with ever greater perceived social interdependence at every level, from the family to the world of nations.... Between 1945 and 2000, one trend was to think about legal technique, in the aftermath of the critiques of CLT and the social, as the pragmatic balancing of conflicting considerations in administering the system created by the social jurists. At the same time, there was a seemingly contrary trend to envisage law as the guarantor of human and property rights and of intergovernmental order through the gradual extension of the rule of law, understood as judicial supremacy.' Whereas the social emanated originally from Europe, and was received eagerly by Americans still hungry to receive intellectual influence from 5. See Halley & Rittich, CriticalDirections, supra note 2, at 771-75. 6. Kennedy, Three Globalizations,supra note 4, at 21, 37-62. 7. Id. at 21, 63-71. 8. Id. at 22. Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2011 3 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 23 [2011], Iss. 2, Art. 1 192 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 23:189 abroad, Kennedy's concon consciousness is a largely American export, and indeed in this Part we will see American legal elites gaining confidence in their own powers to reconstruct all of law in the interwar period, during the rise of the social. Today, American legal influence is everywhere, carrying not only the pragmatic balancing impulse but also a neoformalist "identity/rights complex" putting faith in rights as enforced by judges. Both of these elements of concon will play an important part in our story here: Public law neoformalism strongly resembles the practices of late nineteenth-century U.S. courts, which took the CLT construction of private law and applied it to the U.S. Constitution. After WWII, liberal civil libertarians who had strongly criticized the conservative public law neoformalism of the earlier period took up the same practice through the Warren Court.