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Rosenbury on Working Late

By Larry Solum

Laura Rosenbury (Washington University St. Louis) has posted <a href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100401/fool_100401/20100401">Working Late?</a> on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:<ul> Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely workplace liasons. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without. </ul> <ul> Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways that the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have considered whether family law should recognize intimate relationships and nonintimate sexual encounters outside of the home, and no scholar has considered whether family law should recognize and foster such relationships in the workplace. </ul> <ul> Part II turns to workplace relationships and encounters, developing a a typology that distinguishes between long-term intimate workplace associations, "affairs," and short-term relationships focused on sexual expression, "flings."  Building on pioneering work by Rosemary Agonito in "Dirty Little Secrets : Sex in the Workplace," the practices of those who self-identify their workplace associations as flings and affairs are shown to be constructed by the law's maintenance of a divide between workplace and family. That divide amounts to state support of the types of intimacy and sex within marriage that traditionally played vital roles in maintaining state-supported patriarchy and that still largely follow gendered patterns today. Family law thereby reinforces traditional gender role expectations rather than alleviating them. </ul> <ul> Part III then explores how simultaneous legal recognition of intimate and sexual workplace associations and family could lead to greater opportunities to structure life free from state-supported gender role expectations. By supporting more pluralistic forms of intimate and nonintimate association, family law could transform not just workplaces and marriage, but gender itself.</ul>

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 01, 2010 (boomark / email).