Article On Race, Care Work, and the Private Law of Inheritance

Dorothy E. Roberts  (Professor, University of Pennsylvania School of Law) recently published an article entitled, Race, Care Work, and the Private Law of Inheritance, 40 Law & Soc. Inquiry 511-518 (2015). Provided below is an abstract of the article:

In Someday All This Will Be Yours, Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Although race does not figure in Hartog’s analysis, highlighting its latent presence illustrates the often unspoken yet fundamental role race plays in legal regulation of families.