AALS Section on Family & Juvenile Law Program

A reminder that at this week's Annual Meeting of the AALS in San Diego, the AALS Section on Family & Juvenile Law will present a program on Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 8:30 – 10:15 am. entitled "The Growing Disconnect Among Work, Family and Marriage."   According to Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson (Washington & Lee University School of Law), who will be moderating the program:

this panel will examine why it is hard for women and men across the socio-demographic spectrum to combine work, marriage, and family, and ... how the growing disconnect plays out differently for different people.  For example, women and men at the bottom of the income ladder often combine work and children, but do not marry or have long-term stable relationships on which they can draw. Many low income men are not marrying, although fathering children, and struggle to find work. At the other end of the income scale, highly educated men and women often face difficulties combining work, family and marriage; hence the "opt-out revolution," in which professional women are leaving the workplace in droves, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently, to focus on their families.  Significant numbers of professional men and women have never been married or are divorced or separated. Many also have no children living with them. Understanding the disconnect among marriage, family, and work for individuals across the socio-demographic spectrum is important to understanding the limits of what family law can and cannot do in this regard. This panel will examine these phenomena in detail, drawing on the insights of demographers and sociologists, as well as law faculty.

Panelists include

Ruth Milkman, Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA;
Sharon Sassler, Associate Professor at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology;
June Carbone of the University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Law;
Nancy Dowd of the University of Florida Levin College of Law; and

The program will be co-sponsored by Women in Legal Education, Socio-Economics, Minority Groups, Law & Social Science, Poverty, and Children and the Law.

See you there.  BGF