Susan Frelich Appleton & Albertina Antognini, Abolishing the Family.
Family law scholarship is replete with calls for reform. Yet gender-, race-, and class-based inequalities within and across families remain intractable. So what if, instead of reforming the family, we abolish it?
Abolishing the family might sound like a startling idea for a family-law analysis, especially after decades of efforts to expand the legal understanding of “family.” But the proposal is hardly new. In this Article, we begin the project of considering what an abolitionist family law might entail by engaging with the literature on family abolition, which has up until now mostly appeared outside of law.
While family abolition is in many ways a radical departure from current law reform and family law scholarship, we show that it is not wholly unprecedented. Our analysis provides a taxonomy that brings together legal and non-legal critiques that strike at core features of the family. In particular, we identify five theoretical models that we discover in the existing literature and that we argue provide different paths towards family abolition. They are: the direct compensation model, the communal care model, the friendship model, the disaggregation model, and the statist model. Each model envisions a world in which law does not maintain the family’s narrowly defined status as a distinctive entity meriting special rules. We end by operationalizing these models and consider how each might respond to the various family law problems we set out, all of which focus on care—who performs it, who receives it, and how it is valued.
Engaging in an abolitionist, as opposed to reformist, project provides a way to address problems in family law that have proven intransigent and reveals why reforms have been so difficult to implement. To be clear, we are not advocating for any particular path to accomplish family abolition. Instead, we are dismantling the veneer of inevitability and appeals to nature that couch discussions of both the family and family law. Ultimately, this Article expands conversations about family law to include family abolition and, in turn, conversations about family abolition to include family law.