Search results

This Article concerns a relatively unseen form of labor that affects us all, but that disproportionately burdens women: admin. Admin is the office type work – both managerial and secretarial – that it takes to run a life or a household. Examples include completing paperwork, making grocery lists, coordinating schedules, mailing packages, and handling medical and benefits matters. Both equity and efficiency are at stake here. Admin raises distributional concerns about those people – often women – who do more than their share of this work on behalf of others. Even when different-sex partners who both work outside the home aspire to equal distribution of household labor, it appears that the family's admin is more often done by women. Appreciating the unequal distribution of this work helps us to see the costs of admin for everyone. These broader costs include wasted time, lost focus, and interpersonal tension. Though the types of admin demands that people face vary by gender, class, age, and culture, admin touches everyone. The Article makes this form of labor more salient, both analytically, through an account of its features and costs, and practically, through proposals for public and private interventions. Admin is "sticky." It frequently stays where it lands, whether with female partners of men, one member of a same-sex couple, an extended family member managing another's affairs, or parents of some adult children of the so-called millennial generation. By demanding time and attention, admin impinges on leisure, sleep, relationships, and work. Admin warrants a range of possible regulatory responses. Government should create less admin and possibly do more kinds of admin for people. Regulatory infrastructure should protect people's time and spur technological innovations that reduce admin. Courts should allow parties in civil suits to claim damages for lost personal time. These and other initiatives should help to make admin more salient as a legal and cultural matter and to reduce its burdens overall. Reducing admin should benefit everyone and, in turn, disproportionately benefit those who bear its greatest burdens.

This is a crucial juncture for U.S. disability law. In 2008, Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which aims to reverse the courts' narrowing interpretations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This legislative intervention provides an important lens through which to consider attitudes toward disability, both because the success of the ADAAA will depend on judicial attitudes, and because the changes rendered by the ADAAA shed light on pervasive societal attitudes. This Essay makes three main points. First, the ADAAA intervenes in the developing doctrine on disability discrimination in important ways; in so doing, however, the ADAAA carves up the definition of disability, for the first time distinguishing "actual disability" from "regarded as disability," and expressly reserving the right to accommodation for "actual disability." This move repudiates a strong form of the social model of disability and accedes to a hierarchy of discrimination that treats the failure to accommodate as a different and lesser form of bias than direct discrimination. Second, and less prominently, the ADAAA introduces an express ban on reverse discrimination claims. Though the provision is arguably positive on a practical level, the fact that this provision could pass without protest — at a time when reverse discrimination claims on the basis of sex and race have become increasingly prominent and legitimate — sets into relief the low status of disability in the popular imagination. Finally, the expanded definition of "disability" under the ADAAA, though useful for many potential plaintiffs, may have unanticipated attitudinal consequences. As the class of those who count as disabled grows, a legal buffer is removed between "nondisabled" and "disabled," in ways that may increase the existential anxiety of the nondisabled and result in empathy failures. A key question is how to turn existential anxiety about becoming disabled into an appreciation of disability law as a social insurance policy for everyone. Efforts to improve attitudes toward disability will be critical in the coming years, as anticipated by the awareness-raising Article 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Marital names shape our ideas about marriage, about our children, and about our selves. For about a hundred years, American states required married women to take their husbands' names in order to engage in basic civic activities such as voting. While the law no longer requires women to change their names, it still shapes people's decisions about marital names in both formal and informal ways. For example, the formal legal default rule in most places is that both spouses keep their premarital names. This rule is minoritarian for women, which means it imposes a range of social costs on women who make the most conventional naming choice. But the rule is majoritarian for men, which means it does nothing to unsettle the most robust aspect of our current marital naming conventions – the fact that men almost never change their names, even to hyphenate. This fact about men's names – coupled with the fact that children almost always have their father's name, even if their mother makes an unconventional naming choice for herself – means that women are ostensibly choosing their marital names, but in fact they are choosing from a very limited decision set. That is, women effectively can have nominal continuity either with their past (their families of origin and premarital selves) or with their future (their children and possibly their spouse), but not across all three generations. The formal legal default that both spouses keep their names reinforces this bind for women. Informally, legal institutions also shape choices through desk-clerk law, that is, advice given by the government functionaries who answer public inquiries at state and local agencies. These legal actors frequently mislead people and discourage unconventional naming choices as a result of ignorance or their own views about proper practice. Because states historically reinforced a regime of patrilineal descent of names, what might seem a neutral default regime is inadequate. States should set defaults and frame choices to encourage more egalitarian decisions about whether to change names and how. States could try any number of creative solutions using existing categories for thinking about choice regimes, drawn from contract-law theory: default rules (what rule the state fills in if the parties don't speak to the contrary); menus (what range of options parties are given); and altering rules (what steps parties must take to contract around the default rule into different alternatives). Most modestly, states could adopt a forced choosing approach, requiring both spouses to state their postmarital names. More ambitiously, states might encourage hyphenation and, at the next generation, biphenation – defined as the passing of one name from each hyphenated parent – by making this the default option. States could also create what might be called framing rules, which would dictate how the state asks the question of parties in a choice regime. Framing rules encompass what information the state gives parties, what words it uses, what context surrounds the question, as well as the timing of the question. Framing rules are particularly important in contexts, such as marital names, where social conventions exert a strong influence on choices, and where desk-clerk law is likely to be erroneous or misleading.

Right now, marriage and monogamy feature prominently on the public stage. Efforts to lift prohibitions on same-sex marriage in this country and abroad have inspired people on all sides of the political spectrum to speak about the virtues of monogamy's core institution and to express views on who should be included within it. The focus of this article is different. Like an "unmannerly wedding guest," this article invites the reader to pause amidst the whirlwind of marriage talk and to think critically about monogamy and its alternatives.

Marriage and monogamy feature prominently on the public stage, but not all romantic relationships come in pairs. While people across the political spectrum debate the different-sex requirement of civil marriage, this article focuses on another limiting principle of monogamy's core institution: the twoness requirement. In particular, the article elaborates the practice and ethical principles of contemporary relationships of more than two people, called polyamory. Such relationships take many forms and aspire to several identifiable values, including radical honesty, consent, and the privileging of more sexual and loving experiences over other activities and emotions such as jealousy. The article asks why polyamorous relationships face such severe normative censure. After considering various objections, the article concludes that one key component of the censure is, paradoxically, the ability of most people to imagine themselves having sex with someone other than a primary partner – in other words, a paradox of prevalence. Despite the widespread desire for more than one sexual partner, however, and despite relatively widespread nonmonogamy, most people do not engage in polyamorous relationships. But neither do most people affirmatively choose monogamy: Laws and norms exert strong pressure on people to promise monogamy, and most people simply succumb to this pressure. The article argues that although monogamy is a sound choice for many, polyamory is a sound choice for others. Building on this premise, the article considers some ways that information-forcing principles of contract law might be used to help encourage people to make active, reflective choices about monogamy.

part PART I: DEFINITION AND MODELS -- chapter 1 Defining Impairment and Disability: Issues at Stake -- chapter 2 Philosophical Issues in the Definition and Social Response to Disability -- chapter 3 What I Learned -- chapter 4 Critiquing the Social Model -- chapter 5 The Mountain -- chapter 6 Does Disability Status Matter? -- part PART II: THEORIES OF EQUALITY AND INCLUSION -- chapter 7 Disability Equality: A Challenge to the Existing Anti-Discrimination Paradigm? -- chapter 8 Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity -- chapter 9 Anti-Subordination Above All: A Disability Perspective -- chapter 10 Agency and Disability -- chapter 11 The Landscape of Discrimination Today -- chapter 12 Mental Disability Law in a Comparative Law Context -- chapter 13 Deaf Matters: Compulsory Hearing and Ability Trouble -- part PART III: ACCOMMODATION AND ACCESS -- chapter 14 When it is Reasonable for Europeans to be Confused: Understanding when a Disability Accommodation is -- chapter 15 Challenging Disabling Barriers to Information and Communication Technology in the Information Society: A United Kingdom Perspective -- chapter 16 Antidiscrimination and Accommodation -- chapter 17 Utilitarianism and Distribution to the Disabled -- chapter 18 Disability Studies and the Future of Identity Politics -- part PART IV: LIFE AND DEATH -- chapter 19 Disability, Life, Death, and Choice -- chapter 20 Somewhere a Mockingbird -- chapter 21 Reimagining Retardation, Transforming Community -- chapter 22 Introduction -- chapter 23 Was I Ever Wrong.