Below is the abstract for “Constituting and Reconfiguring Families,” available for download on SSRN.

This chapter provides background material for conversations held at the 2022 Global Constitutionalism Seminar (a part of the Gruber Program on Global Justice and Women’s Rights) at Yale Law School.

The chapter explores how courts have addressed complex questions about family relations as emerging technologies and shifting social norms have altered what family structures look like across the globe. It focuses on the parent-child relationship, examining the grounds on which such a relationship rests and whether a child can have more than two legal parents. Questions of multi-parent recognition are not new, but they are arising with urgency in the face of rising rates of assisted reproduction and increasingly transnational practices of family formation. In exploring contemporary conflicts over parental recognition, the chapter considers how courts grapple with the rights and interests of children.