Family Formation and the Home

In this article, we consider the relevance of home sharing in family formation. When couples or groups of persons are recognized as families, they are afforded significant benefits and given certain obligations by the law. Families have their own category of laws, rights, and obligations. Currently, the law of family formation and recognition is in a state of flux.

Although in some respects the defining legal lines of the family have been well settled for centuries around blood and the formal legal ties of marriage and parenthood, in significant ways, the family form has been fundamentally altered over the past few decades. The law of family formation has finally flexed to include normalization of same-sex couples through marriage equality. And, Assisted Reproductive Technologies ("ART") and gamete donors have broken the essentiality of the conjugal, genetic link between parents and children, making reproduction more widely accessible to a greater range of persons. Thus, the traditional "channeling function" of family law-into the nuclear sexual family including a heterosexual couple and its biologically and genetically related children-is expanding to include alternate family forms.