Private Lives; Families, Individuals, and the Law.

Vol. 15 No.3 (March 2005), pp.219-220

PRIVATE LIVES; FAMILIES, INDIVIDUALS, AND THE LAW, by Lawrence M. Friedman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 240pp. Hardcover. $27.95. ISBN: 0-674-01562-2.

Reviewed by Patricia McGee Crotty, Department of Political Science, East Stroudsburg University. Email: pcrotty@po-box.esu.edu

This is an amazing book. In fewer than 190 pages, Lawrence Friedman traces the history of family law in the United States, illustrates how this law has changed its focus from the family unit to the individual, and emphasizes how cultural settings shape family relationships in the United States as well as in other nations.

Friedman’s theme is that the needs of the individual usually predominate in family conflicts. He aptly illustrates how this transformation is reflected in legal practices. His first chapter introduces the concepts of “expressive individualism,” “the optional family,” and “the negotiated family” (pp.7-8). Throughout the text, Friedman outlines how the concept of what constitutes a family has become more elastic and how family law has adjusted to keep pace with social realities.

By tracing the history of both marriage and divorce since the nineteenth century, the second and third chapters emphasize how lifestyle choices have transformed the family’s legal shape, from the ideal of social unity that led to such negative legal practices as coverture and collusions over divorces, to a contractual relationship where individual interests predominate. When tracing this history, Friedman observes how the need to maintain control over property has frequently determined the legal precedents used in family law conflicts.

Individual liberty can be more appealing than unity interests even within the family. Modern attempts to reverse this trend, like covenant marriages, appear destined to fail. Friedman believes that individuals should have the right to customize their relationships through domestic partnerships and civil unions and that individual commitment is key to longevity. However, the legal difficulties individuals face when trying to formalize or end unions make it clear that marriage and divorce are still contracts that involve three parties – two individuals and the state, and it is the state that makes the rules.

The family has also been transformed by new reproductive technologies and by changes in adoption laws. Chapter Four illustrates this in reviewing the conflicts that can occur between biological and social parenting. Although in daily life, social parenting may be more important, biology usually triumphs in legal decisions that involve custody issues.

In his final chapter, Friedman concludes that family law is beginning to recognize the ideology of social choice. In support of this notion, he traces a series of legal decisions on contraception, abortion, and sodomy and draws on his extensive knowledge of the role that the media [*220] plays in publicizing private lives. He notes that, although most of us want to have our own privacy needs respected, we are voyeuristic when it involves the private lives of others. Privacy entails some important issues and is the one area of this book where brevity does not do the topic justice. Friedman could have devoted more attention to privacy’s nebulous legal standing and the role that it has played in veiling much of the physical and psychological abuse that takes place in the family and in the home.

I am pleased that I took Friedman’s “voyage of the family from status to contract, from rigidity to flexibility, from compulsion to choice” (p.179). It is an enjoyable and easy read. I do believe, however, that its lack of technical sophistication makes it more appropriate for the general reader or for sociologists than for students of law and politics.

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