If you do not read as much about celebrity gossip as I do, you likely missed recent news that Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, the child of actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, filed to remove “Pitt” from her name within days of her eighteenth birthday. The split between Jolie and Pitt was sparked by an alleged incident of domestic violence and several of Jolie’s other children have already informally dropped “Pitt” from their names, so the petition itself is unsurprising. Also unsurprising, however, is that every article I saw about the name change petition included Brad Pitt in the headline—so no matter what her legal name will be, Shiloh will continue to be identified as Brad Pitt’s daughter.
But what if she could also petition to sever that link? The story reminded me of a fascinating article published last year by Sean Hannon Williams arguing that adult children should have exit rights from the parent/child relationship and mapping out several versions of what that exit might look like. Professor Williams uses a less sensational but more concrete example to illustrate the need for exit rights; an acquaintance raised by an abusive mother used an adult adoption to sever her legal relationship with her biological mother. Williams points out that the adult adoption was only possible because the woman’s stepmother was willing to become a replacement legal mother—in the absence of someone willing to take on that legal status, his acquaintance would have no ability to legally separate herself from her biological mother. He asks why adult children should be “trapped in a legal relationship that they never consented to,” (P. 668) and spends the rest of his article outlining the why and how of exit rights for adult children.
Williams begins by dispensing with what he calls the “natural law façade of family law,” (P. 672) arguing that availability of divorce upon demand and adult adoption, both of which require the consent of only one person exiting the marriage or parent/child relationship, show that family relationships are not permanent. He then outlines theoretical justifications for an adult child’s duty to their parents, both rejecting them as a moral obligation and arguing that even if they did create a moral duty, that duty should not be enforced through family law. Williams moves on to examine the question from the point of view of the adult child wanting to exit the relationship. I found this portion of the paper to be one of the most thought-provoking sections, particularly when Professor Williams discusses different family roles as elective (assumed by choice), ascriptive (imposed from outside), or conscriptive (imposed by one member of a relationship upon another person). (Pp. 693-96.)
As Williams describes, a single family relationship can take on any of these forms depending on the circumstances—becoming a parent might be elective or ascriptive (particularly in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health), the parent/child relationship could be elective on the parent’s side but ascriptive on the child’s, or ascriptive on a parent and theoretically elective on behalf of the child if another parent or the state chooses to seek child support on behalf of a minor child. These identities are complicated further once existing examples of exit are included—marriage is jointly elective, but taking away the status of “spouse” can be elective by the party seeking the divorce yet ascriptive/conscriptive if the other person would rather stay married. (P. 696.) Some of the most active debates within family law implicitly center on what relationships should fit into which type of identity.
Having described the current state of unequal and shifting roles within family law, Professor Williams moves on to discuss the stakes for an adult child who wishes to terminate their legal relationship with their parent. There are some legal implications of remaining in the parent/child relationship—primarily inheritance rights and the ability to make medical decisions for an incapacitated parent or child—although they are obviously fewer than before the child reaches the age of majority. But in addition to the legal stakes, Professor Williams also stresses the social and identity-related stakes for an adult child who doesn’t want any tie to their parent. He analogizes the identity aspect to marital divorce, asking the reader to consider how they would feel if the state removed the legal tie to a former spouse, but insisted that you remained spouses in name only. Williams argues, probably correctly, that anyone who supports the existence of legal divorce would bristle at the idea, seeing expressive value in saying who you are not in a familial relationship with, and argues that adult children have the same interests in severing all links to a parent.
Having made his case for the “why,” Professor Williams outlines a number of possible exit regimes, including the substance of whether the former parent and child would become legal strangers or simply have asymmetric obligations (P. 714), such as allowing the adult child to inherit and make medical decisions for the parent if the parent was incapacitated, but not giving the parent the same rights. He also describes six different procedural options of what might justify terminating the parent/child relationship. (Pp. 715-25.) Many of the questions I thought of as I read were covered in the last section of the paper confronting possible objections, which I appreciated since many readers may bristle at the idea of adult children being able to both go “no contact” and cut off their parent legally.
As my example of Shiloh Jolie hopefully illustrates, this is not an article that convinces the reader of a thesis and is then neatly slotted into future footnotes demonstrating a single conclusion. Instead, the article has stuck with me because of how well it raises a raft of questions not just about the specific idea of adult children severing the legal relationship with their parents, but broader themes such as the idea of permanence in family statuses and the interactions between legal and social roles. I have some remaining prosaic questions: the law draws a bright line at the age of eighteen between “child” and “adult,” but my instinctive response to an argument about divorcing parents varies if I imagine an eighteen-year-old versus a thirty-year-old. The law’s bright line seems increasingly artificial and inaccurate, and severing a legal relationship before a person’s frontal lobe is fully developed and at an age when parent/child relationships can often be tempestuous seems saliently different than the same choice made by a person who is by any measure a fully cognitive adult. I also wonder about the potential exploitation of such exit rights—an eighteen-year-old who will receive considerable need-based financial aid for college if they are deemed to have no parents, for example.
The questions that keep popping up in my mind, however, are broader. Thinking about how and why legal relationships create an identity that a person might want to discard prompted a range of questions about the causality between legal relationship, social norms, and identity values. Professor Williams writes at length about the identity value of a legal status, which I find very easy to recognize in other family law contexts. For example, when marriage equality was still in question, it seemed obvious why giving same-sex couples all the legal consequences of marriage but calling their relationships something else like domestic partnerships or civil unions was still not equal. But that may not be true throughout family law, or it may not be true where the granting of legal recognition itself was the significant identity-conferring move.
For example, there has been some recent media attention to the plight of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women trapped in a marriage because their husband refuses to give them a gett, a religious divorce. Such women are free to secure a civil divorce, but it is the private social and religious identity as still married that is significant to them, not their legal status as recognized by the state. And as mentioned earlier, every single news story about Shiloh Jolie had words such as “daughter of Brad Pitt” in the headline, and if Shiloh were to sever Pitt’s parentage through an adult adoption I am confident headlines would continue to link the two. Professor Williams talks about the significance of social norms around marriage as one reason justifying exit rights (P. 700), but as polyamory wins greater public recognition and acceptance it seems fair to question whether those norms have as much strength as they used to. And if those norms weaken, and the identity-granting dimension of marriage becomes less important, by Professor Williams’s logic that divorce is necessary to remove the identity of “X’s spouse,” if society doesn’t care if you’re X’s spouse does that weaken the case for no-fault divorce?
I don’t have answers to any of these thoughts, but it is rare that a single article prompts so many open-ended questions in my mind. Professor Williams described his goal as “begin[ning] a conversation,” (P. 712) and he has succeeded many times over.
