Autonomy or Community? An Evaluation of Two Models of Parental Obligation

Marsha Garrison
1998 California Law Review  
The article examines this question: How much do parents owe their children? It describes the historical development of the child support obligation and current support "guidelines," mandated by Congress with the hope of raising support levels. It utilizes several distributive justice theories to evaluate the guidelines, concluding that they fail under any approach. The article explains that all of the surveyed distributive justice theories lead to one of two support models. The "Community
more » ... bases the support obligation on family membership and mandates income sharing as a basic approach. The "Autonomy Model" bases the support obligation on both the societal burden produced by nonsupport and the nonsupporting parent's contractual obligations to the custodial parent; it mandates public assistance (or poverty) prevention and contract enforcement as basic goals. The Article describes the results that the Community and Autonomy models would achieve and evaluates available evidence bearing on the choice of a model, including survey data on public attitudes toward the support obligation, the extent to which each model is consistent with the assumptions implicit in related areas of law, and the ability of each model to meet the policy concerns that motivated the child support initiatives in the first place. It concludes that the Community Model is the better choice.
doi:10.2307/3481147 fatcat:uwoku4al6rerliocenx6mc6zyy