Rawls and the family

Cross posted on Political Arguments.

In a little over an hour I'll be presenting a paper on John Rawls and the family at the University of Chicago's Political Theory Workshop. I've been working on this topic on and off for several yers now, and my convictions on the matter have changed quite a bit in that time. By the end of law school, influenced by Susan Okin's reading of the "early Rawls", I believed in the state's active role in shaping families that were liberal through-and-through. Now, after internalizing the "later Rawls" I have asummed a more pluralistic stance, all the while hoping that most families will eventually converge on sove version of the liberal model.

The paper is a very rough draft, intended, first, for submission to a seminar, and later for publication. All of your comments are appreciated. Note that there are substantial references to the French Civil Code—both the current version and the Napoleonic original—which I have not had the time to translate. The English versions of the Napoleonic Code and the current Civil Code a available online.