Adding a Conceptual Framework to Rural Family Law
December 5, 2024
[Editor’s note: This is the second of four blog posts from a mini-symposium on Shelly Kreiczer-Levy’s and Baoshi Wang’s article “The Family of the City, the Family of the Country“, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 71, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 328–353.]
The Family of the City, the Family of the Country by Shelly Kreiczer-Levy & Baoshi Wang makes an important and unique contribution to the field of Family Law. The rural family has long been ignored in most legal scholarship. While a few academics (myself included) have written about discrete topics concerning the rural family, prior to this article no one had tried to write a conceptual piece about rurality and Family Law. Instead, prior work on the rural family has focused only on one legal issue in one jurisdiction. Think articles focused on abortion rights, child custody disputes, or family inheritance policies. The Family of the City, the Family of the Country takes note of these prior articles and the larger body of literature about rural-urban difference in the law, but then builds on that work.
What The Family of the City, the Family of the Country adds is a conceptual framework. The authors start by describing the scope of their project: that they present “different types of state involvement in the bifurcation of familial practices of care across geographical distinctions.” It is their look at these “different types of state involvement” in a comparative law context that makes the paper so ambitious. It also means they can offer a more conceptual framework to understand how governments treat families in rural versus urban areas.
But let me back up to a core piece of knowledge in Family Law that underlies the theories presented in this paper: the government is involved in forming and shaping families. In our individual lives, many of us like to think that we make our choices about our family relationships and structures without influence by the government. As a Family Law professor, one of the first and biggest points I make is that the laws surrounding family influence how individuals live their lives. The best scholarship showing this government influence on the family is probably “Public Vows,” Nancy Cott’s book on marriage. Kreiczer-Levy & Wang build on this basic understanding of Family Law by expanding the analysis: it is not just that the government influences family (this is well-established), but that the government influences family in different ways in urban versus rural spaces (this is their contribution).
To show this rural/urban difference, Kreiczer-Levy & Wang present three case studies covering intergenerational care in China, family farms in Israel, and abortion access in the United States. The case studies are ambitious—they cover three areas of law in three different countries. The heavy lift is to make sense of such different case studies and to present a way to understand all three. To do this, they have to make an important observation about how rural/urban differences in Family Law are created. They categorize how these differences come about, noting that sometimes governments will engage in “differential treatment” by creating explicit laws treating urban and rural spaces differently, but sometimes governments will create “spatially blind policies” that look the same but apply differently in rural and urban spaces. This categorization—of “differential treatment” versus “spatially blind policies”—is probably the biggest takeaway the article produces because it allows future legal scholarship to build on how rural/urban differences in Family Law originate.
In order to present their theory of categorization, the authors have to successfully engage with two separate bodies of scholarship. The first is scholarship in Family Law about the government treatment of families. The second is scholarship from law and rurality scholars that looks at rural/urban differences or place-based policies. They manage to draw on both of these bodies of scholarship and make sense of them both. In the coming years, I hope there is future work done at the intersection of rural/urban difference and Family Law. That future work will be able to rely on The Family of the City, the Family of the Country as a conceptual starting point.