Free-market champions Becker and Posner opposed no-fault divorce and sexual privacy rights

Evidence

What are we to make of the fact that the same neoliberal thinkers who extolled the virtues of the free market order were also prepared to defend the legal and economic bonds of kinship as inescapable, noncontractual obligations? And should we be surprised to learn that the American neoliberals were stridently opposed to the sexual privacy jurisprudence of the 1970s which turned sexual freedom into a constitutional right and ushered in the so-called sexual revolution in family law? Or that Gary Becker and Richard Posner were opposed to no-fault divorce? Only, I would argue, if we neglect the necessary role of family responsibility within the neoliberal vision of a free market order and only if we forget the historical relationship between economic liberalism and the poor law tradition—a tradition which, in the words of one historian, confounds the “moral and economic functions of the family.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s interest in fracturing the caricature of neoliberalism with internal varieties — family law is a site where ‘the state staying out’ never applied. — connects to: Neoliberal legal scholars opposed constitutional privacy rights and favored private contracts instead; Neoliberals opposed no-fault divorce to force families to absorb social costs — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 241

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal legal scholars opposed constitutional privacy rights and favored private contracts instead #expands (0.85)
• Neoliberals opposed no-fault divorce to force families to absorb social costs #corroborates (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 241