| This study examines the United States Supreme Court's treatment of the family over the last three decades, when the Court began expansively interpreting the Constitution to extend rights of privacy and autonomy to the family and its individual members. The state has traditionally regulated the family's form and functions to assure that the family would complement the structure of relationships in the public realm by absorbing the costs of dependency and properly socializing its members as citizens political understandings of citizenship, autonomy and dependency are deeply imbricated in the family. Recognizing family and individual rights to privacy has raised two questions of considerable political importance: how should the costs of dependency be allocated between the public and the domestic spheres, and what kind of citizen is the state entitled to seek to reproduce? Attempts to answer those questions taps into deep-seated anxieties whether the family can continue to assume its traditional functions, and, more broadly, about those basic social structures that impose order in a civil society, and that mediate the relationship between the individual and the state.To date, scholarship on the family has paid insufficient attention to the independent interest of the state in regulating the family. How concerns about dependency and socialization are intertwined, and how constitutional concepts, particularly rights of privacy, are used to mediate those concerns, are discussed. Finally, the study asks whether the state can or ought to promote a normative vision of the family, given the traditional precepts of a liberal polity that militate against articulating such a vision.In some cases, the Court has expansively interpreted rights of privacy and equality for individuals in others, the Court has appeared to try to hold the family together in its traditional form, recasting those same rights in ways that recapture the privileged position of the procreative family and maintain traditional allocations of power within the family. |
