The Family Franchise: Elderly Parents and Adult Siblings

In this paper, I am going to concentrate on one family transition where we have established substantial legal barriers-that of emancipation. However, I will briefly allude to other broken families, such as the divorcing family and the family divided by adoption. As students of the family, we are preoccupied with divorce. We write about families in crisis and use the fabric of their lives worn thin and stretched to the breaking point to develop our ideas about what families are and even what they ought to be. In a way, of course, law teaching and the Socratic method drive us toward such family autopsies. Happily, most of us live most of our lives in families that are much healthier: We grow, we develop trust, and we dare to share ourselves with the special people in our inner circle. Much of the law that is in the broadest sense family law-frequently the unexplored law-protects us and encourages us and sometimes even pushes us to live within families in particular ways. What I would like to do today is to launch my own exploration into what family means in a peculiar context, one in which it seems that there are few legal obligations but some of the strongest and most important relationships in life. Today I want to focus for awhile on what I call the family franchise-the relationships present even after the strongest legal bonds are broken by emancipation, adoption, or divorce. Perhaps you share some of these situations as well. I first think about my elderly and increasingly idiosyncratic parents. I have siblings with families of their own who nonetheless taunt me with snatches of remembered intimacy. I consider the father of my children, who-though we are no longer legally husband and wife-daily teaches me about responsibility and faithfulness. Finally, I dwell on my oldest child, whose birthday was my happiest day, and who is now beginning her own independent life in college. I know these are all people to whom I am somehow, thankfully, forever closely bound. Despite such people\u27s importance in our lives, we do not spend much time in law school courses thinking about them, about how we as lawyers and lawmakers can strengthen these relationships. To tie these into more general observations, I hope to show how this largely untraversed area of family law relates to the concerns we have treated as more central in our courses-in particular, the laws relating to provision for minor children and those relating to marital property. On a still more global level, I wish to suggest that the current preoccupation with rights forces us into a less-attractive model; It need not be so