Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
As an area of scholarly and pedagogical interest, family law concerns adult intimate partnerships and parent-child relationships. Most of the laws and cases that comprise the current family law canon are race-neutral, leading to a centering of the white family in legal analysis. Family law in its current form is only conceptually coherent, however, if the experiences of non-white people are shunted into fields such as criminal, welfare, or immigration law. The family remains a site where racial meaning is created, and the law continues to play an active role in shaping those meanings, regulating who can partner together and reproduce. Family has also been a powerful metaphor for belonging in this country and thus a stage on which anxieties about citizenship have continued to play out, as evidenced by recent efforts to curtail birthright citizenship. Because marriage was, and continues to be, a sexual and economic relationship, the regulation of family inherently involves the policing of sexuality and gender roles: the study of race and family relationships is necessarily intersectional.
The papers in this panel all study the dialogical relationship between race and gender, as mediated through family relationships. They study how family choices and the laws available to certain families produce racial experiences, and how race affects family members along the lines of gender and sexuality. And they interrogate how individuals’ family formation choices reflect political calculations to maximize access to white privilege. These papers ultimately reveal underappreciated mechanisms by which the law perpetuates white supremacy.
• Robert Chang, Professor of Law and Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights, UC Irvine School of Law
• Rose Cuison-Villazor, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar, Rutgers Law School
• Kaiponanea Matsumura, Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, UCLA Law JD ‘07
• Jessica Dixon Weaver, Professor of Law and Vinson & Elkins Faculty Fellow, SMU Dedman School of Law
As an area of scholarly and pedagogical interest, family law concerns adult intimate partnerships and parent-child relationships. Most of the laws and cases that comprise the current family law canon are race-neutral, leading to a centering of the white family in legal analysis. Family law in its current form is only conceptually coherent, however, if the experiences of non-white people are shunted into fields such as criminal, welfare, or immigration law. The family remains a site where racial meaning is created, and the law continues to play an active role in shaping those meanings, regulating who can partner together and reproduce. Family has also been a powerful metaphor for belonging in this country and thus a stage on which anxieties about citizenship have continued to play out, as evidenced by recent efforts to curtail birthright citizenship. Because marriage was, and continues to be, a sexual and economic relationship, the regulation of family inherently involves the policing of sexuality and gender roles: the study of race and family relationships is necessarily intersectional.
The papers in this panel all study the dialogical relationship between race and gender, as mediated through family relationships. They study how family choices and the laws available to certain families produce racial experiences, and how race affects family members along the lines of gender and sexuality. And they interrogate how individuals’ family formation choices reflect political calculations to maximize access to white privilege. These papers ultimately reveal underappreciated mechanisms by which the law perpetuates white supremacy.
• Robert Chang, Professor of Law and Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights, UC Irvine School of Law
• Rose Cuison-Villazor, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar, Rutgers Law School
• Kaiponanea Matsumura, Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, UCLA Law JD ‘07
• Jessica Dixon Weaver, Professor of Law and Vinson & Elkins Faculty Fellow, SMU Dedman School of Law
