Private Tragedies? Family Law

as Social Insurance

Anne L. Alstott*

Family law is full of private tragedy. Case after case pits one familymember against another in a zero-sum struggle for resources. Spouses battleover limited assets; parents clash over child support; and children fight eachother for resources when parental income is stretched across multiple fami-lies. Bad choices and bad luck, it seems, precipitate calamity; and there islittle that the law can do when families self-destruct amidst unemployment,poverty, mental illness, disability, substance abuse, domestic violence, childneglect, and other problems.1

By legal tradition, family law is private law: it governs relationshipsbetween individuals, rather than between individuals and the state.2 On thisview, family law, like other forms of private law, exists primarily to fosterprivate order. On this view, family law should implement individuals inten-tionsand should not redistribute risk and resources according to some pub-lic ideal. As private law, then, family laws core mission is to resolvedisputes among family members when private order breaks down. Accord-ingly, functional families should have little to do with the law; they managetheir own affairs without legal supervision. Dysfunctional families, by con-trast, involve the law in inevitable tragedy. Once affective bonds havefrayed and private order has failed, the courts must resolve disputes as bestthey can, and all too often any decision will harm one party or the other.

This Essay argues that this view of family law rests on an exaggerateddistinction between private and public. Family law is more than a mecha-nism for implementing private preferences and resolving disputes when pri-vate order breaks down. Instead, family law forms part of a larger system ofpublic lawa social insurance system that allocates the risk of life eventslike disability, family breakup, mental illness, substance abuse, and parentalpoverty. Family law does not simply pick up the pieces when individualsmake bad choices or suffer bad luck. Instead, the law creates distributiverules that help determine which choices are bad ones and whose bad luck

* Manley O. Hudson Professor, Harvard Law School. I thank Janet Halley for helpfulcomments. The Harvard Law School and the Harvard Law School Fund for Tax and FiscalPolicy Research provided research support.

1 For numerous examples of these problems in case law, see, for example, JUDITH AREEN& MILTON C. REGAN, JR., FAMILY LAW (5th ed. 2006).

2 See generally ERNEST J. WEINRIB, THE IDEA OF PRIVATE LAW 1 (1995) (describing pri-vate law as connect[ing] two particular parties through the phenomenon of liability). Notall elements of law taught in a typical family law course are private law in this sense: theconstitutional law of reproductive rights, for instance, is public law. But divorce, alimony,property settlement, and child supportcore topics taught in a standard introductory course onfamily laware typically thought to be private law, because they settle the legal rights ofspouses against each other.

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carries ruinous consequences. Taking this view, it is not just the dysfunc-tional who live in laws domain: successful families flourish amidst legalrules that protect some from lifes risks while leaving others vulnerable.

Put another way, family law rules that establish financial relationshipsand liability between individuals constitute a form of social insurance: therules of family law supplement those of familiar public programs, like SocialSecurity and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), that addresslife risks including poverty, unemployment, and disability. For instance,family law confers a legal right to care and to financial support based onformalized marriage, biological and adoptive parenthood, and certain kindsof recognized and rewarded behavior during marriage. Social insurance inthe United States also adopts categorical protections; and while these varyacross programs, distinctions may reflect formal marital status, paid-employ-ment history, and income level. The categories and their consequences maydiffer in the two regimes, but both systems of law adopt normative classifi-cations that recognize some relationships (and not others) and protect againstsome risks (and not others). Further, both systems of law can be understoodas distributing risks ex ante, rather than simply addressing failure ex post.

One apparent difference between the obviously public realm of socialinsurance and the purportedly private sphere of family law lies in the redis-tributive power of the two types of law. Family law typically limits supportobligations to a small class of related people: it imposes alimony obligationson spouses and support duties on parents or children. And family law doesnot have access to the states taxing power, no matter how great a spouses orchilds need. By contrast, social insurance deliberately uses the power of thestate to effect broad redistributiontaxing workers, income earners, andconsumers for the legal benefit of third parties.

But this difference too is often overstated. Some family law rules usestate power to impose lasting obligations on people who are affective orliteral strangers, who believe themselves to have contracted around responsi-bility, or who are actively hostile to one another. Think about the childsupport obligations of an estranged parent or a divorced stepparent, filialresponsibility laws that tax children with the support of their aged parents, oralimony imposed on long-divorced spouses. One scholar has proposed achild support assurance plan that would blend the two regimes, expandingfamily laws mandate to include a claim on public funds if needed.3 At thesame time, some social insurance programs do not redistribute among indi-viduals. They may simply extract a fee for services or regulate the purchaseof certain goods, or they may create an intrapersonal obligation of an indi-vidual to her (older) self or to her own family. Think about private accountsproposed to replace Social Security or mandated benefits like family leavethat may reduce workers own wages.

3 See IRWIN GARFINKEL, ASSURING CHILD SUPPORT 4550 (1994); discussion infra notes5458 and accompanying text.

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In this Essay, I begin to integrate family law and social insurance, withthe goal of gaining a better understanding of both regimes and their relation-ship to each other. To make the discussion concrete, I consider two casesone involving spousal support and disability and the other involving childsupport for multiple familiesand I demonstrate that they illustrate twopoints of overlap in family law and social insurance. First, both cases illus-trate the interdependence of financial entitlements in family law and in so-cial welfare. Both legal regimes make assumptions about the other andabout the existence of family financial support and care. And the two re-gimes operate together to determine who suffers financial disaster whenfamilies break up and when disability and poverty strike.

Second, both cases demonstrate that a range of changes in family law,social welfare law, or other elements of law could alter the distribution oflifes risksand thus the likelihood and consequences of apparently privatetragedies. For example, scholars have debated whether child support shouldbe imposed on parents alone or shared by the state.4 A social insuranceanalysis challenges the binary distinction (parent/state) and opens up newpossibilities ranging from small income taxes on extended family membersto taxation of the childs own (adult) earnings.

To be sure, present family law and social insurance address different, ifsometimes co-occurring, life risks. Family law governs disruptions in what Iterm affective lifethe realm of life including formalized family bondsof marriage and parenthood, as well as less formal but still important emo-tional relationships including cohabitation and potentially even friendship.5

By contrast, social insurance addresses disruptions in working lifedisabil-ity, unemployment, retirement, and low wages. It might seem, then, that thetwo bodies of law are distinct enough to occupy separate analytic categories.

But one agenda of this Essay is to challenge the split embodied in cur-rent law between large scale, ex ante, public protections for working life andsmaller scale, ex post, purportedly private protections for affective life. Putanother way, I want to frame as problematic the fact that conventional socialinsurance takes work disruptionand only work disruptionas its subject.The risks of working life are, indeed, major risks in a capitalist society. Butan engagement with family law helps remind us that a wider range of riskscan threaten adults well-being and childrens development. Disruptions inaffective life can also threaten economic security and individual develop-ment: divorce, parental exit, and parental dysfunction, for instance, can leadto calamity just as surely as unemployment and disability.

4 This is an old and still debated question. For a discussion of the debate and a contribu-tion, see ANNE L. ALSTOTT, NO EXIT (2004).

5 For other scholarship recommending attention to what I term affective life, see, forexample, Clare Huntington, Repairing Family Law, 57 DUKE L.J. 1245 (2008) (recommendinga deeper integration of psychoanalytic models of emotional development into family law inorder to recognize the importance of emotional relationships outside formal legal boundaries);Laura A. Rosenbury, Friends With Benefits?, 106 MICH. L. REV. 189 (2007) (suggesting thatfamily law should recognize relationships of care beyond those in marriage and marriage-likerelationships).

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My point, then, is that once we understand social insurance as the useof law to address, in a deliberate way, the major risks of life, then the focusof present programs on the risks of paid employment begins to seem oddlynarrow. A first step, which I take here, is to show how family law oper-atesdespite its traditional private-law labelas social insurance for affec-tive life. A second step, which I defer to a larger project, is to ask whetherpublic programs ought to address, more explicitly, the consequences of riskstraditionally covered by family lawrisks of divorce, nonmarriage,parenthood, and childhood.

Would it be sensible, feasible, or desirable for the conventional socialinsurance system to expand its mission to respond to disruptions in affectivelife as well as to disruptions in working life? A larger project will delineatein more detail the elements of present law that insure affective life. TheConclusion describes the scope of the project in more detail and acknowl-edges the hard normative and empirical questions it raises.

This Essay, and the larger project of which it is part, owes much tofeminist scholarship connecting social welfare and family law and challeng-ing distinctions between public and private and between work and care.6 Forinstance, many scholars (and I am one) have recommended reforming socialwelfare and social insurance programs with the aim of improving the finan-cial security of children and their caregivers.7 This Essay aims to add toexisting work on social welfare, families, and gender by suggesting how tomap more fully the legal structures that allocate a wider range of life risks,including not only care work but disability, unemployment, domestic vio-lence, substance abuse, and poverty.

In a larger sense, this Essay also builds on family law scholarship chal-lenging the private/public distinction and situating the family in its full legalcontext. Thanks to the efforts of many scholars, family law today encom-passes the study of gender, domestic violence, reproductive rights, and theregulation of sexualityissues that span legal fields from constitutional lawto torts to criminal law and beyond.8 Like these scholars, I aim to situate theseemingly private tragedies of family life in a larger legal context.

6 See, e.g., MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN, THE NEUTERED MOTHER, THE SEXUAL FAMILY(1995) (arguing that the state and the family support inevitable dependency); LINDA C. MC-CLAIN, THE PLACE OF FAMILIES (2006) (considering how the state should support family life);SUSAN MOLLER OKIN, JUSTICE, GENDER, AND THE FAMILY (1989) (arguing that justice requirespublic attention to, and reform in, the purportedly private realm of family life); Gillian Lester,A Defense of Paid Family Leave, 28 HARV. J.L. & GENDER 1 (2005) (addressing proposals forlabor regulations to improve working conditions for parents).

7 See ALSTOTT, supra note 4, at 171204 (recommending new public programs to addressthe economic vulnerability of parents); FINEMAN, supra note 6, at 23033 (recommending statesupport for mothers).

8 See, e.g., JUDITH AREEN, FAMILY LAW (4th ed. 1999), at 13680 (gender roles),291325, 133443 (domestic violence), 102956 (reproductive rights), 2545 (sexualidentity).

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I. IN RE MARRIAGE OF WILSON: SPOUSAL SUPPORT AND DISABILITY

Spousal support (alimony) offers one divorced spouse a legal claim forcontinued financial support from the other. A California case, In Re Mar-riage of Wilson,9 illustrates the interplay of spousal support with Social Se-curity disability and shows how changing family law rules, social insuranceentitlements, or other legal regimes might alter the seemingly zero-sum, pri-vate tragedy of the Wilson marriage.

A. The Tragedy: Divorce and Disability

Tom and Elma Wilson married in 1976, when he was thirty-six and shewas thirty-eight.10 Their marriage lasted a little less than six years. Fouryears into the marriage, in 1980, Elma fell and suffered severe brain damageand deficits in social judgment, common sense, and social intelligence. Shecould no longer work, and doctors predicted that the damage would be per-manent. They divorced in 1982, and Tom paid Elma alimony of $500 permonth. Together with $436 per month in Social Security disability benefits,Elma could just make ends meet.

But after paying spousal support for more than four years, Tom had hadenough. He sued to stop paying alimony, and Elma contested. Their dis-pute, Wilson v. Wilson, exemplifies the kind of private tragedy family lawroutinely encounters. The trial court, and then the appellate court, faced azero-sum game. Relieving Tom of his support obligation would leave thedisabled Elma in need and with no capacity to support herself. But continu-ing Toms support obligation would limit his capacity to make a fresh start inlife. (Note that in Wilson and in this Essay, the technical term spousalsupport means legally mandated, post-separation or post-divorce payments;the term does not refer to the financial support offered to a spouse in anintact marriage.)

According to the trial court, Wilson posed a conflict between two linesof family law doctrine. On the one hand, the law treats marriage as a seriousobligation with lasting consequences. Spouses are understood to be part ofan economic community, so that a needy (former) spouse has a legitimateclaim on a prosperous one, even after divorce. Of the eight factors to beweighed in spousal support cases under California law at the time, six ofthem implemented this principle of need: the factors gave weight to Elmasdisability, her age, her employment prospects; and to Toms greater earningsand assets, and his higher living standard.11 On the other hand, the court

9 In re Marriage of Wilson, 247 Cal. Rptr. 522 (Cal. Ct. App. 1988).10 See id. at 524 (noting that in 1986, at the time of the support hearing, Tom was forty-six,

and Elma was forty-eight).11 For a list of factors, see id.

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noted, the law does permit marital dissolution,12 and implicit in that decisionmust be a principle that at some point marital obligations cease so that eachspouse may get on with his or her life.

The trial court asked, [A]t what point in time does the obligation toassist Mrs. Wilson become one of societys as distinguished from an obliga-tion that is Mr. Wilsons? and found that it is societys at this point intime.13 The appellate court found that the trial court had not abused itsdiscretion in balancing the equities and finding under these circumstancesthe obligation to assist Elma should shift from Tom to society.14

The appellate court mentioned, in passing, that Elma received $436 permonth in Social Security benefits. The reference, presumably, is to SocialSecurity Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is payable to workers with asubstantial work history. In 1986, when Wilson terminated Toms supportobligation, the federal poverty threshold for one person was $5,360.15 WithToms support, Elma lived modestly but sustainably at about 200% of theofficial poverty line. Without Toms support, Elmas $436 per month($5,232 per year) would leave her below the official poverty line, a livingstandard that represents dire economic distress.16

Wilson remains good law, although its application to particular cases isuncertain given the multi-factor determinations necessary. A subsequentCalifornia case declined to read Wilson as establishing a broad public policyagainst long-term spousal support.17 In that case, the appellate court re-versed a trial court order terminating spousal support for a functionally dis-abled, fifty-nine-year-old woman after a marriage of nine years. The courtcautioned that the Wilson holding should be considered in the specific con-text of the marriage at issue and called for a careful weighing of all thefactors in each case.

Wilson takes place against the backdrop of legal reforms intended toprotect displaced homemakers. These spouses, typically wives, spent yearsrearing children and subordinating their careers (if any) to ensure that their

12 Id. For another case involving spousal support and disability, see In re Marriage ofBiderman, 6 Cal. Rptr. 2d 791 (Cal. Ct. App. 1992) (upholding trial courts termination ofspousal support for clinically depressed and unemployed ex-husband).

13 Wilson, 247 Cal. Rptr. at 524 (quoting trial court).14 Id. at 52527.15 See U.S. DEPT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVS., PRIOR HHS POVERTY GUIDELINES AND

FEDERAL REGISTER REFERENCES (1986) (citing 51 Fed. Reg. 5105 (Feb. 11, 1986)), availableat http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/figures-fed-reg.shtml.

16 The official poverty measure is well-known to reflect a cumulation of analytic errorsand questionable normative judgments. Constructed in the early 1960s with limited data, thepoverty line has been updated only for inflation (and not for growth in national income andliving standards) since then, with the result that the poverty line today represents extremelysevere economic distress. Many social scientists (though not all) believe that the official pov-erty line is too low; they adopt instead a measure in the range of 200% of poverty in orderbetter to approximate economic deprivation relative to the living standard in the modernUnited States. See Anne L. Alstott, Why the EITC Doesnt Make Work Pay, 43 COLUM. J.L. &SOC. PROBS. (forthcoming 2009) (manuscript at 68, on file with the Harvard Law SchoolLibrary).

17 In re Marriage of Heistermann, 286 Cal. Rptr. 127, 130, 133 (Cal. Ct. App. 1991).

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husbands could work full-time and develop their own careers. Upon di-vorce, these often middle-aged women found themselves at a disadvantagein the labor market, and yet, at one point, the doctrine of spousal supportcalled for them to become self-supporting on the theory that the dissolutionof a marriage properly leaves each party to subsist solely on his or her ownearning power. In effect, the limitation of spousal support permitted the hus-bands to retain most of the value of their own earnings while consigning thewives to live on their own wagestypically at a far lower standard of livingthan they had while married.18

In response to criticism by scholars, lawmakers, and others, the law ofspousal support developed, albeit unevenly, to incorporate protections forthe displaced homemaker. We can see these protections in Wilson, wherethe court acknowledged the protections accorded to longer marriages, thosewith children, and those in which one spouse sacrificed for the other.

The irony, of course, is that the court in Wilson not only found theseprotections inapplicable to Elma but also made use of them to terminate herspousal support. Drawing a contrast to the long-married, self-sacrificing,good mother protected by the law, the appellate court described the Wilsonpartnership as a childless marriage of short duration19 and referred toElma as a middle aged bartender with adult children.20 In the next sen-tence, the court implied that Elma did little to accommodate Tom, againdrawing an implicit contrast with the family-centered homemaker wholeaves her job: [Elmas] lifestyle was established [at the time of the mar-riage and did not change thereafter].21

Wilson thus poses hard questions about the nature of marriage: Shouldthe law presume that all marriages create solemn, life-long obligations? Orshould the law, in effect, recognize a lesser category of companionate mar-riage, signaled by middle-aged entry and childlessness, and accommodatedby the law with an easier-come, easier-go set of obligations?

At first glance, Wilson represents a classic private tragedy. The law ofspousal support presents the courts with a zero-sum game: they can protectthe needy Elma, but only by yoking Tom to a long-term financial burden thatwould limit his life options and deny him, perhaps, the ability to marryagain.

The courts, then, must harm one party or the other, and perhaps for thatreason, both the trial and appellate opinions adopt language that emphasizesElmas (risky) choices and bad luck: she is a middle-aged bartender withadult children whose father is no longer in the picture. Her bad luckorperhaps her drunken stuporleft her with brain damage. At the same

18 See HARRY D. KRAUSE & DAVID D. MEYER, FAMILY LAW IN A NUTSHELL 29798 (5thed. 2007).

19 Wilson, 247 Cal. Rptr. at 524.20 Id. at 526.21 Id. The court also repeats, in a footnote, Toms charge that Elma fell while in a

drunken stupor and Elmas rather incoherent response to the effect that she had a hunch, butno distinct memory, that Tom had been involved in her fall. Id. at 523 n.1.

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time, the courts implicitly treat Toms (better) choices and luck as equallyprivate and personally owned. Elma did not, says the court, make sacrificesto further Toms career; nor did they have children together. In the end, thecourts resolve the private tragedy by appealing to public law. Toms privateobligation to Elma, the courts find, has come to an end, and so Elma mustbecome a state responsibility, a public charge.

But a closer look at the legal context of Wilson reveals how Toms andElmas choices and luck occurred amidst two social insurance systemsthelaw of marriage and the Social Security program. We do not always think oflegal marriage as a form of social insurance, and of course marriage repre-sents more than that. Still, the financial support and in-kind care obligationsthat attend marriage (as well as those that persist following divorce) re-present a significant potential resource for people with disabilities. Thescope of marital obligation is clearly the issue presented in Wilson, and thetrial court addressed it head-on: in the courts view, Elma had exhausted thesocial insurance entitlement accruing to her particular marriage and wouldnow become the states responsibility.

But the decision in Wilson likely did not qualify Elma for any addi-tional state supportdespite her dire situation. Social Security disabilityinsurance is categorical, meaning that only those suffering severe work disa-bility can qualify, and those who return to employment can no longer claimbenefits. But the program is not income-tested, meaning that benefits do notrise if the beneficiarys income drops. Thus, Elmas monthly cash benefitwas determined by her own earnings and work history, and it would notincrease if her other sources of income disappeared.22

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a means-tested program that cansupplement Social Security disability benefits, but it assists only those inextreme poverty. While SSDI provides a benefit based solely on past earn-ings (and thus is paid without regard to current income), SSI is means-testedand paid only to those in the direst financial circumstances. In 1982, Elmawould most likely have been ineligible for SSI, which, during this period,provided maximum benefits for a single person amounting to less than sev-enty-five percent of the individual poverty line.23

Strikingly, then, and despite the courts rhetoric, the denial of spousalsupport in Elmas situation did not impose any additional responsibility onthe state. Instead, the decision left Elma to live in dire poverty, subsisting on

22 At age sixty-two, Elmas situation might improveor it might not. She could not qual-ify for higher benefits based on Toms earnings record since they were married less than tenyears. If she had been married before (a matter not clear from the opinion), and if her firstmarriage had lasted ten years or more, she might at age sixty-two qualify for a higher retire-ment benefit if her former husbands earnings were high enough. Her intervening marriage toTom would not affect eligibility since the marriage ended in divorce.

23 See STAFF OF THE HOUSE COMM. ON WAYS & MEANS, 110TH CONG., 2008 GREENBOOK: BACKGROUND MATERIAL AND DATA ON PROGRAMS WITHIN THE JURISDICTION OF THECOMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS 3-17 tbl.3-3 (Comm. Print 2008), available at http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/110/ssi.pdf. SSI benefits are reduced dollar-for-dollar by So-cial Security benefits. See id. at 3-22 tbl.3-5, 3-23 tbl.3-6.

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her SSDI income alone, unless she could marry again or prevail upon heradult children for assistance.

Another striking feature of the family law/social insurance system isthat spousal support following divorce is frankly redistributive in a way thatsocial insurance may not be. Toms spousal support represented redistribu-tion from a better-off individual to a worse-off one, and it took place be-tween two now-unrelated people hostile to each other. But Elmas SSDIbenefit to some degree represented a return of her own earlier payroll taxcontributions, which purchased retirement savings and an insurance contractagainst disability. To be sure, Social Security does redistribute income bygiving lower-wage workers a relative bargain compared to a purely actuarialinsurance premium.24 Still, Elmas public benefits had a substantial privatecomponentjust as if she were drawing down savings or had purchasedprivate disability insurance.

B. Spousal Support as Social Insurance

Putting family law and social welfare law together, we can see that thenominally private tragedy of Wilson occurred amidst two legal sources ofsocial insurance: a family-law entitlement to spousal support and a publicentitlement to Social Security. Stepping back from Wilson to generalize,Table 1 depicts the combined family law/social welfare system for adults25

who develop disabilities. The table describes the individuals legally en-forceable rights (and omits consideration of voluntary financial support andcare by affective partners, children, and others).

24 See Jeffrey B. Liebman, Redistribution in the Current Social Security System 12 (NatlBureau of Econ. Research, Working Paper No. 8625, 2001) (noting the higher replacementrates for low wage workers but noting that shorter life expectancy and other factors tend toreduce the average redistribution from higher- to lower-wage workers).

25 Adults whose disabilities developed in childhood are treated as children for purposes ofSocial Security: they qualify for benefits (or not) based on their parents earnings history. SOC.SEC. ADMIN., PUB. NO. 05-10026, BENEFITS FOR CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES 1011, availa-ble at http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/10026.pdf.