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Melissa Murray’s article The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers exposes a reality of contemporary family life that family law had relegated to the invisible, parents’ reliance on networks of caregiving, both paid and unpaid. In doing so, The Networked Family makes several significant contributions to family law scholarship.
Although Murray provides several worthwhile points of departure, this brief response attempts to follow just one strand, the possible implications of her analysis for certain inequalities and hierarchies that long have characterized family law. Here, I consider what Murray’s call for recognition of caregiving networks might mean, first, for the traditional gender stereotypes that family law once embraced but now professes to reject and, then, for the issues of race and class that family law all too routinely ignores. To be sure, at points Murray acknowledges these variables—for example, in noting the promise of one theoretical approach that she considers, dismantling the notion of legal parenthood altogether. My response takes a closer look at caregiving and hierarchies of gender, color, and class.
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By Laura A. Rosenbury
Melissa Murray’s thought-provoking article The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers provides a compelling analysis of the limits of functional approaches to the family. Although these approaches have been among the most important concepts motivating family law reforms and scholarship over the past thirty years, Murray illustrates the many ways in which they have both overlooked the complexities of childrearing and positioned caregiving as the sole domain of parents and their functional equivalents.
Taking up Murray’s call for "others to join this important conversation," I enthusiastically support Murray’s project. Her article is outstanding, and I hope it will spur a fundamental shift in family law scholarship. Indeed, despite her modesty, Murray has proposed several alternatives that could radically alter the law’s current view of the parent-child relationship and of family relationships in general. I support these proposals to the extent that they force reformers and scholars to confront who benefits and who is harmed by legal conceptions of the family, even ones that have been expanded to reflect functional approaches to the family. I fear, however, that Murray’s analysis may be held back by an assumption about the appropriate relationship between rights and reality often embraced by family law scholars including, at times, by Murray herself.
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By Clare Huntington
In her provocative article The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers, Professor Melissa Murray offers a much-needed corrective to the view that families are “autonomous islands” and argues that the law should recognize the networks of care provided by nonparental caregivers. I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Murray that the law should support families in providing care. I am also deeply sympathetic to the claim that family law is overly reliant on binary opposites—here, the mutually exclusive categories of parent and legal stranger—that do not capture the complex reality of family life. And I applaud Professor Murray’s initiation of a conversation about these concerns.
To advance that conversation, I want to engage with a central aspect of Professor Murray’s argument: the nature of the recognition she argues that the law should provide for nonparental caregivers. Two basic paradigms seem likely. First, we might understand recognition to be simply cognizance of and greater attention to the care provided by nonparents. Once we recognize the network of caregivers, it may be possible for the law to support that network in a variety of ways. By contrast, we might understand recognition to mean direct legal protection of the relationship between a nonparental caregiver and a family.
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