Family law encompasses the policies and doctrines regulating familial and intimate relationships in American society.  The family is the basic institituion in society for caring for the inevitable dependency needs experienced by all individuals and family law defines, regulates and supports the relationships that count as legal families.  These include, most importantly, the relationships between intimate adult partners in committed unions and the relationships between parents and children.  Although traditionally marriage was the only legally sanctioned family law, modern family law recognizes and regulates non-marital families, including same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting couples and families in which parents are not married.

Family law incorporates many themes and issues dealt with in other courses and concentrations.  Most importantly, perhaps, family relationships are intricately bound up with issues of gender.  Therefore there is substantial overlap between family law courses and gender studies.  Because the regulation of resources and wealth in families is a core component of family law, the basic Property course provides important background to the study of family law.  Since dissolution of families is an important focus of family law, the basic course in Contracts and courses in alternative dispute resolution are useful adjuncts to studying family law.  Family law sometimes crosses the traditional divide between civil and criminal law.  Thus, the first-year course in Criminal Law informs the study of family law.  Although historically family law has been primarily state iaw, with much variation across jurisdictions, in the last century federal regulation of families has increased dramatically.  At the same time, the Supreme Court has played an increasingly important role in defining the constitutional parameters of family relationships.  In this regard, the basic Constitutional Law course is an important foundation to the study of family law.

In addition to the general introduction to Family Law offered for upperclass students, there are a variety of other upper-level courses, seminars and clinics that in combination provide a rich understanding of the legal regulation of families and of individuals within them.  These include courses such as Meanings of Motherhood; Children in the Legal System; Trusts and Estates; Estate Planning; and Juvenile Justice.  Many seminars are also available.  These include Perspectives on Family and Gender; Family and the State in Historical Perspective; Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights; Topics in Law and Sexuality; Domestic Violence and the Law; Genetics and the Law; Selected Issues in Children and the Law; Law and Policy of Homelessness; Estate Planning for Individual and Family; Welfare Law, Entitlements and the Poor; Feminist Legal Theory; and Abortion: Law and Context.  CLS also ffers several clinics that deal with family issues: Child Advocacy Clinic; Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic; and the Prisoners and Families Clinic.  Finally, students can undertake an externship with Battered Women's Legal Service.

L6252 FAMILY LAW (3 pts)
C. Sanger
This basic offering will focus on legal regulation of marriage and other intimate relationships and will examine the sociological justifications for state intervention in families. Substantial coverage will be devoted to economic aspects of marriage (including the equitable division of property by courts as well as private ordering), child support and child custody. Examination required.

L6501 JUVENILE JUSTICE (3 pts)
(see Criminal Law)

L9169 SEMINAR: ABROTION: LAW IN CONTEXT (3 pts)
C. Sanger
This seminar looks at abortion from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives: legal, medical, philosophical, cross-cultural, sociological, historical, and political. It also draws upon representations of the experience of abortion from films and autobiogrpahical accounts. Selected topics will include abortion secrecy, men and abortion, teen-age abortion regulation, and an exploration of the status of the fetus. We will read the relevent Supreme Court cases but this is not at core a constitutional law seminar.

L8006 SEMINAR: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE LAW (2 pts)
D. Leidholdt
This seminar provides an in-depth examination of domestic violence from a legal perspective. It explores a wide range of topics, including police and prosecutorial responses, expert witness testimony, battered women as criminal defendants, domestic violence and child custody, legal remedies for battered immigrants, and domestic violence as a human rights concern. Each subject area brings together doctrinal issues with those of practice and of theory. Readings are drawn from case law, state and federal statutes, and legal and social science commentary. A number of the topics are approached using case studies drawn from actual cases handled by attorneys at the Center for Battered Women's Legal Services, where Professor Leidholdt serves as director.

L9816 SEMINAR: MEANINGS OF MOTHERHOOD (3 pts)
A. Kessler-Harris, C. Sanger
This course will explore the shifting and contested meanings of motherhood as individual experience and in its institutional context at different historical moments and in contemporary United States. The materials focus on the complex relationships between motherhood and such topics as work, citizenship, sexuality, poverty, reproductive technologies, and the fetus itself. We will also look at categories of mothers (birth mothers, grandmothers, immigrant mothers, unwed mothers, welfare mothers, slave mothers, to name a few). Materials will be drawn from historical sources, legal texts, and selected fictional works.

L8158 SEMINAR: PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY AND GENDER (2 pts)
E. Scott
The seminar explores the legal regulation of family relationships and gender roles from various academic perspectives, through an examination of legal literature dealing with contemporary issues in the field. The first few weeks of the semester will be devoted to an overview of the issues and debates, and of different scholarly viewpoints, including historical, feminist, law and economics, and social science and law perspectives. After that, we will focus each week on a single law review article. For each article, students will write brief reaction papers. Each student will select one article for an extended critique. Students will be graded on their written critiques, their reaction papers and on their general class participation.

L9390 SEMINAR: TOPICS IN JEWISH LAW: BIOMEDICAL ETHICS (2 pts)
(see History and Philosophy of Law)

L8007 EXTERNSHIP: BATTERED WOMEN'S LEGAL SERVICE (2 pts)
(see Individual Student Community and Court Projects)

The following are not offered in 2007-2008 but are part of the regular course offerings at Columbia Law School.

L9203 PRISONERS AND FAMILIES CLINIC (5 pts)
(see Clinics)

L9015 SEMINAR: SELECTED ISSUES IN CHILDREN AND LAW (2 pts)
Rosenberg
This seminar will focus on the reform of public systems serving children. Using case studies, we will look at different approaches to reforming public education, child welfare, juvenile justice, and children's health systems. We will also look at aspects of advocacy on behalf of classes of children, and the variety of roles that lawyers can play in dealing with these politically and structurally complex issues.

L9819 SEMINAR: THE FAMILY & THE STATE (2 pts)
Dubler
In an age when family law topics regularly dominate political debate (see, e.g., same-sex marriage and marriage-promotion policies), this seminar will explore how the law has constructed the institution of the family, focusing on the ways in which courts and legislatures have used the family as a site for defining women's and men's distinct legal, social, and political rights and responsibilities. Paying particular attention to principles of federalism and constitutionalism, we will study the history of laws concerning the family, including laws regulating marriage, divorce, domestic violence, reproduction, and parenthood. Our goals will be to draw on legal, historical, and theoretical sources to understand how the law has defined which relationships count as familial and which do not; what it has meant legally to be a wife, husband, lover, mother, father, son, or daughter; and how the legal regulation of families has varied across race and class, paying particular attention to the role of slavery. Beyond examining the law of domestic relations, we will consider how family roles have determined an individual's relationship to the state, and how the family has structured debates,and continues to structure debates, about citizenship and public institutions, for example, the suffrage, the wage-labor relationship, and the welfare state.

Students who take this seminar for two points will write periodic response papers, which may fulfill their minor writing requirement. In lieu of these papers, a take-home exam option is also available with the instructor's permission. Students who take this seminar for three points may complete their major writing requirement by writing a research paper in lieu of an exam.