Tali Schaefer (on leave)
Affiliation
- Graduate Student Fellow, Columbia Law School
Research
Ms. Schaefer is a doctoral candidate at Columbia Law School. She previously earned an LL.M. from Columbia University, and an M.A. in Medieval History and an LL.B from Tel Aviv University. Her fields of interest are family law, law and society, and the sociology of the family.
ABSTRACT
Ms. Schaefer's J.S.D. project explores the intricate relations between the social reality of changing American family structures, the legal regulation of parenthood, and the global trends of worker migration. In dealing with misfit, dysfunctional, or simply unavailable ever more hard-working parents, courts throughout the United States have increasingly come to regard paid in-home caretakers as a satisfactory supplement, and at times even a substitute, for parents. This project investigates how courts have come to prefer parents who employ in-home caretakers and examines the social implications of this trend. Its main argument is that, paradoxically, the reliance on non-relative paid care in situations of family disruption, allows courts to reinforce the model of an exclusive nuclear family, and protect it from what is perceived as external intrusion. The project argues that this judicial preference is harmful: it exposes a substantive class bias in the way courts reaffirm a specific version of good parenting - intensive child-focused mothering - easily attainable by the wealthy few; it reinforces traditional gender roles; and it is detrimental to paid caretakers, whose substantial parental role goes unnoticed, masked as the acts of the paying loving parents.
