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Pride and Prejudice: a Study of Connections

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Pride and Prejudice: a Study of Connections Scholarship Repository University of Minnesota Law School Articles Faculty Scholarship 2000 Pride and Prejudice: A Study of Connections Mary Louise Fellows University of Minnesota Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Mary Louise Fellows, Pride and Prejudice: A Study of Connections, 7 VA. J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 455 (2000), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/272. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Minnesota Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in the Faculty Scholarship collection by an authorized administrator of the Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: A STUDY OF CONNECTIONS Mary Louise Fellows* INTRODUCTION Although customs surrounding attribution require that only I be named as author of this Article, that fact obscures other truths about this Article.1 One way for readers to appreciate this Article as reflecting group activity at the same time it reflects my own in- dividual effort is the literary allusion in the title to Jane Austen and her work. I feel a particular connection to Jane Austen because she seems neither to have enjoyed nor sought the solitary life many of us imagine novelists live. When Austen finds herself, after ten years of having written virtually nothing, back in a permanent home with her sister and widowed mother at Chawton she enjoys exceptional literary success. 2 She sees finally the publication of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and she writes Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.3 The evidence of solitary hours in her newly acquired cottage is scarce while the evidence of familial connectedness is substantial. She continued to share a bedroom with her sister Cassandra, and she apparently worked * Everett Fraser Professor of Law, University of Minnesota. Portions of this Article are drawn from Mary Louise Fellows et al., Committed Partners and Inheritance: An Em- pirical Study, 16 Law & Ineq. 1 (1998). I am reminded of a passage found in one of Virginia Woolf s notebooks where she explores biography: "The biographer cannot extract the atom. He gives us the husk. Therefore as things are, the best method would be to separate the two kinds of truth. Let the biographer print fully, completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; Then let him write the life as fiction." Notebooks, Monk's House Papers, University of Sussex Library Manuscript Collections, quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf 10 (1996). One of my purposes is to find a way for the reader to look beyond the "husk" and appreciate the underlying connections among individuals reflected in the making of and the subject of this Article. For a further discussion of the quoted passage and Woolf s consideration of biography, see Hermione Lee's excellent chapter on biography in Lee, supra, at 3-20. 2 See Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life 208 (1997). 3 See Dierdre Le Faye, Chronology of Jane Austen's Life, in The Cambridge Compan- ion to Jane Austen 1, 8-11 (Edward Copeland & Juliet McMaster eds., 1997). 456 Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law [Vol. 7:3 right in the thick of the household clamor on the first floor of the house between the front door and some offices. 4 In the recently published biography on Austen, Claire Tomalin found it necessary after telling us these facts to add "[w]e find it surprising that Jane did not want to be alone, claiming the privacy that seems appro- priate to a writer... .-5Rather than being surprised, I was drawn to Austen because she did not want or need to be secluded. For me Jane Austen is representative of writers who have as much need for connection as they do for solitude, and they establish life rhythms that negotiate with relative ease the tension between those two states of happiness. One form of connection is working collaboratively, and col- laboration certainly best describes the scholarly process behind this Article, which reports the findings of an empirical study on inheritance. 6 The purpose of the study was to assess public atti- tudes about including surviving committed partners as heirs-a study of connections and the legal recognition of them.7 For read- ers to place my emphasis on collaboration as well as the findings of the empirical study into further context, I need to describe a similar study that I published twenty years ago (the 1978 study). 8 The 1978 study assessed public attitudes about how to distribute the property of a decedent who died without a will among surviv- ing family members, including a legal spouse, children, parents, and grandchildren. Both the 1978 and the current study integrated my scholarship with my teaching: law students were involved in the design of both studies from the outset. For the current project I 4 See Tomalin, supra note 2, at 210, 216. 5 Id. at 210 6 The complete findings of the empirical study have been previously published. See Mary Louise Fellows et al., Committed Partners and Inheritance: An Empirical Study, 16 Law & Ineq. 1 (1998). 7 When I use the term committed partner, I am referring to unmarried persons who in recognition of their affection for each other have decided to share their lives together- with living together generally involving interrelated financial and living arrangements as well as sexual intimacy. The definition of a committed partner is contested and raises a number of theoretical, political, and practical questions. Does it mean partners who co- habit? Does it mean partners who are sexually intimate? Does it mean partners who are financially interdependent? These questions and many others were explored in the em- pirical study. Mary Louise Fellows et al., Public Attitudes About Property Distribution at Death and Intestate Succession Laws in the United States, 1978 Am. B. Found. Res. J. 319 (1978). 2000] Pride and Prejudice went to the Board of Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice in 1995 and asked them if students on the Board would be interested in participating in an empirical study on inheritance law and committed couples that could then be published in the journal. Five students enthusiastically volunteered-brainstorming sessions, summer reading groups, and sessions devoted to drafting and redrafting of the survey instruments followed. Both projects also integrated my commitment to interdisciplinary work and building relationships with people outside the law: sociologists were initially interested by the legal questions we were asking and ultimately became intrigued by the possibility of using their exper- tise to create knowledge that could lead to law reform. 9 Perhaps a less obvious connection between the two projects is Robert Stein, the former Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School. This connection requires a little more explanation but is no less important to placing the themes of this Article into context. As a young associate professor looking for funding to conduct an empirical study, I traveled to the American Bar Foundation to talk with Bob, who was at that time involved in research sponsored by the Foundation. I requested the meeting to explain why a tele- phone survey could prove useful to legislatures considering heir- ship rights. At that time, the notion of learning about heirship by talking to living persons rather than looking at wills and the estates of dead persons was a new idea. Bob was immediately enthusiastic about the methodology and played an important role in assuring the Bar Foundation's funding. Twenty years later, I sought funding for the current empirical study from the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel's Foundation, which has as its mission the support of research in the area of inheritance law. The funding request described a study that would consider both same-sex and opposite-sex committed cou- ples, recognizing that heirship for the two categories of couples 9 In the 1978 study, Professor Rita J. Simon, who at that time was director of the Law and Society Program at the University of Illinois and Professor of Sociology, Law and Communications Research, was a co-investigator. William Rau, who at that time was a law student and a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, was also a co-author of the study. In the current study, Monica Johnson, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Min- nesota, joined our research group early on and provided invaluable expertise throughout the planning of the survey and the analysis of the findings. 458 Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law [Vol. 7:3 raises different issues with different implications. The idea to do this empirical study arose out of a proposal made by Lawrence W. Waggoner, a preeminent scholar on trusts and estates and national leader on probate reform.' 0 The proposal had not been well re- ceived, in part because of a lack of information about who are committed couples and how they want to share their estates. The methodology was no longer in dispute-the Counsel along with the American Bar Association and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws had embraced the 1978 study and incorporated the findings into the Uniform Probate Code. This time the controversy concerned the questions we were asking. This time the funding was denied. The letter telling us to look elsewhere for funding said in part: After very careful and fairly lengthy deliberations, it was concluded that the Foundation would not fund the grant requested. There was concern expressed with respect to the need for the survey referred to in your Grant Application and whether the survey described and the constituency proposed to be surveyed was broad enough, as well as the overall cost of the sur- vey.
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