Legal Commentary

As alluded to almost a year ago, the April 2010 issue of the Yale Law Journal (website) now has links to two very interesting review essays of Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties, my book with Jennifer M. Collins and Ethan. The first essay is by Prof. Alafair Burke (Hofstra) and it is titled, When Family Matters. Go ahead and throw Alafair a few downloads over here on SSRN. The second review essay, by Professors Alice Ristroph (Seton Hall) and Melissa Murray (Berkeley), is called Disestablishing the Family. You can download that piece over here on SSRN.  

Initially these reviews were supposed to appear with our reply essay in the same issue of YLJ under the "Features" rubric, but b/c of some innocent snafu, our response to these two rich and provocative pieces will actually appear a bit later this spring--I believe in the June issue. For those of you keen to see it beforehand (hi sis!), we've just posted a penultimate draft of that piece on SSRN, and it is entitled Rethinking Criminal Law and Family Status. I hope to blog a bit more about the substance of this exchange over the coming weeks. In brief, though, Part I of our Essay defends our "equal protection" model for analyzing family status against the "j'accuse" of statism made by R-M. Part II plays offense against R-M's proposed model to disestablish the family, and Part III engages Prof. Burke's critiques about the book's argument and scope. Needless to say, we are grateful to YLJ for hosting this exchange and to Alice, Alafair, and Melissa for the effort and verve with which they've engaged our work.

P.S. As mentioned before, you can find another robust exchange of ideas about the arguments in our book in this symposium in the New Criminal Law Review (featuring criminal and/or family law gurus Doug Berman, Naomi Cahn and Jack Chin).