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Race, Care Work, and the Private Law of Inheritance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Dorothy E. Roberts
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Abstract

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.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 511 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2015 

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