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84 Mich. L. Rev. 430 (1985-1986)
Moral Discourse and Family Law

handle is hein.journals/mlr84 and id is 452 raw text is: CORRESPONDENCE Moral Discourse and Family Law Lee E. Teitelbaum * Inaugurating the Michigan Law Review's Correspondence section, Professor Teitelbaum comments on Carl E. Schneider's Moral Discourse and the Transformation of American Family Law, published in the Au- gust 1985 issue of this Review. The editors invite contributions to Corre- spondence in the form of brief comments on legal scholarship recently published here or elsewhere. It seems appropriate in the early stages of an experiment in legal publishing to say something about it, if only because few forms have been as resistant to innovation as the law review. The creation of a section for correspondence regarding recent articles provides a me- dium for conducting just the national discourse which scholarship as- pires to provoke and which does occur in private conversations or letters and, occasionally, in panels at professional meetings. To talk in print about a colleague's work - to praise it, qualify it, pursue sug- gested or alternate lines of thought - is not only an enjoyable thing to do but promises to facilitate more focused interchanges of ideas and research than has previously been possible. What I have to say about Carl Schneider's elegant Moral Discourse and the Transformation of American Family Law I wanders down sev- eral of the avenues mentioned above. The first thing is to praise it. Professor Schneider sets out to examine a familiar phenomenon in a new way, and this he does clearly and persuasively. His principal the- sis can be stated simply enough. A major transformation in American family law has taken place over the last two decades, which is charac- terized by two related developments: a diminution of moral dis- course and a transfer of responsibility from the law to the people the law once regulated. This transformation can be seen in virtually every sub-domain of domestic relations. Looking first at discourse, courts no longer talk in terms of spousal fault as they dissolve mar- * Professor of Law, University of Utah College of Law; on leave from University of New Mexico Law School. B.A. 1963, LL.B. 1966, Harvard University; LL.M. 1968, Northwestern University. - Ed. As evidence of the interchanges promoted by this forum, the author wishes to thank Professors Leslie Francis, Russell Goodman, and Hendrik Hartog for their gentle but infinitely helpful comments on this piece. 1. 83 MICH. L. REV. 1803 (1985).

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