This article proposes veracity and respect as basic guides for law. It thus supplements dominant lines of thought which emphasize instrumentalist criteria such as promoting efficiency, maximizing utility, and deterring and remedying harm. This article proposes that it is a great good for a judge, a legislator, and all who speak as the law to exercise the virtue of veracity and to speak with respect, and that it is especially bad in the case of such legal officers to depart from those practices. It points out some implications for family law.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

"Just Like Little Dogs": The Law Should Speak with Veracity and Respect

Perhaps one of the most important changes in family law in the past thirty years has been the inclusion of certain kinds of friendships in the range of relationships from which rights and responsibilities can flow. Domestic partnership laws, a phenomenon of the 1990s, may be seen as a natural development from the judicial recognition of contract cohabitation and the legislative and judicial response to same-sex couples who, unable to meet statutory requirements for marriage, have sought official recognition of their relationships. This essay discusses an aspect of certain kinds of domestic partnership laws-their formal requirements and the extent to which they represent a greater regulation of a relationship than is found in marriage laws.

Emerging Models for Alternatives to Marriage

This article develops a definition of the term “office,” (as in ‘judicial office” or the office of physician or guardian) as follows: “an office is a ministry to the good of others in some special respect, exercised under the guidance of a system of rules and principles which impose obligations.” The article reviews the components of this definition with special attention to the meaning and good of obligation. The article discusses certain further features of office which often accompany the institution, such as self-sacrificial dedication to ministry. It explores the ethical basis for the recognition and exercise of office, identifying those practices as founded not only on the obvious instrumental goods such as efficiency but also on non-instrumental goods such as those of knowledge and steadiness of character. Further, the article identifies marriage as involving office, proposing that the roles of husband and wife, although they are decreasingly understood in our society in a way which emphasizes their ministerial or obligational sides, are eligible to be regarded as offices.

Marriage and the Ethics of Office

This paper proposes that fully procreatively just affiliations -– the ones which satisfy the criteria developed here -- deserve special support and recognition. It proposes that procreative justice requires such recognition. This paper proposes that it is unjust to conflate and revise the usual categories so as to confuse procreatively just affiliations with other forms. It discusses the harm that ensues.

Procreative Justice and the Recognition of Marriage

This article provides a survey of one major development in family law in the United States that has occurred during the most recent past. This development is the change that has occurred in marriage-like relationships. The article begins with a discussion of contract cohabitation and the extent to which it reflected a change from traditional views of formal or informal marriage as the only legally acceptable model for adults who desired to live together. It shows how contract cohabitation laid the groundwork for the establishment of domestic partnership laws. These laws were first adopted by municipalities and then by states to cover same-sex relationships and then served as a predicate for civil union legislation. That legislation in turn provided a legal model for recognizing same-sex relationships short of marriage. The article provides an analysis and critique of provisions (which are reproduced) dealing with domestic partnerships of the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution proposed by the American Law Institute in 2000.

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"Just Like Little Dogs": The Law Should Speak with Veracity and Respect

Emerging Models for Alternatives to Marriage

Marriage and the Ethics of Office

Procreative Justice and the Recognition of Marriage

New Directions for Family Law in the United States