Changes in Family Law Subject of 2-Day Symposium

Feb 28, 2008 by KCPW

Special Monologues Performance Slated for Tonight

(KCPW News) What constitutes a family? That's the underlying question at the New Frontiers in Family Law symposium that starts today at the University of Utah. Organizer and law professor Laura Kessler says families are heavily impacted by the rule of law, which has changed significantly over the last century:

"We've come from a place where there were anti-miscegenation laws, which said that people of different races could not marry each other; where contraception was criminalized and illegal," says Kessler, a professor of family law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law. "If you even go back further than that, coverture, where women were basically property and lost all their rights upon marriage. So this has been a long process of sort of the loosening of the state's hold [on families]."

Kessler says the current debate over same-sex marriage is just a continuation of this process of change. Eventually, she says, the United States will come to legal terms with same-sex marriage, albeit in what form remains open to debate.

Highlighting different family voices is a part of the family law symposium, which will present Telling Tales on Families: Monologues tonight at the Rose Wagner Performing Art Center's Black Box Theater. Kessler says the goal was to inject the personal stories of different family types into the proceedings:

"[They're] monologues about really hard decisions, about end-of-life decision-making with regard to elderly parents, about death. We have a monologue about a mother who is commonly called a Single Mother by Choice. They represent a wide range of kinship arrangements, of relationships, of issues that come up in families."

The New Frontiers in Family Law symposium presents papers and guest lecturers today and tomorrow in the Sutherland Moot Courtroom at the U's College of Law.

Use the audio player below to hear "The Most Wanted Boys in the World," a monologue by Ruth and Kim Hackford-Peer.

Use the audio player below to hear a conversation with Laura Kessler about the changing nature of family law.

Email to a friendPosted in KCPW Newsroom. Copyright 2008 KCPW