Projects
I study how courtroom discourses have produced, disseminated, and reshaped ideas about family relations, and how these ideas have come to frame the social imaginary of what is possible, plausible, and legitimate law of family. The central actors in my study are the litigants, the lawyers, the judges, the policymakers, and the lay participants in the public debate on law and family. I am most interested in the interplay between trial court processes and transnational law. My scholarship builds on two decades of family law practice in local courts, extensive historical research in the recent several years, and a continuing interest in law and economics. As a result, it intersects with family law, history and law and economics.
Duong Quoc Tuan was one of the 2,204 Vietnamese children evacuated by Operation Babylift from South Vietnam to the United States for adoption in April 1975. Tuan was four years old at the time. Days after his arrival in the United States, Tuan was placed with Barbra and David Pederson for adoption in a Detroit suburb. Having resettled in Wisconsin as a refugee, Tuan’s mother, Duong Bich Van sued the Pedersons for Tuan’s custody in the Oakland County Court in May 1976. Eventually, the court returned Tuan to his mother. Duong Bich Van’s case was a part of the litigation that aimed to reunite the Operation Babylift adoptees with their natural families.
This project investigates the Duong Bich Van case and Operation Babylift litigation. It traces the history of Operation Babylift cases through court records, media reports, and extensive oral history interviews with persons involved in the Operation Babylift litigation, including attorneys, volunteer adoption workers, Vietnamese adoptees, and Vietnam War veterans. It explores why Americans considered mass adoption of Vietnamese children a humanitarian effort; how the adoption laws of South Vietnam and the United States constrained Americans’ populist impulse by asserting the supremacy of natural parents’ parental rights; how these constraints were broken loose during the humanitarian crisis at the end of the war; and how the supremacy of the parental rights of Vietnamese mothers as natural parents was contested and reinforced in the Duong Bich Van case and Operation Babylift litigation in American courts.
This study demonstrates that the legal discourse on natural parental right in the Operation Babylift cases changed the world’s views on humanitarian rescue of children and intercountry adoption and produced a new transnational regulatory scheme on intercountry adoption. Finally, through the lens of post-colonial politics, this project argues that the transnational adoption law principles emerged from the aftermath of Operation Babylift reconceptualized the relationship between the West and the Third World, and affirmed the Third World peoples’ reclaim of their children, natural resources, and sovereignty.
Source: Ann Arbor Sun, July 1, 1976, 28
Duong Bich Van and her attorneys won the custody of her son in Michigan Court (Photo by John Collier, Detroit Free Press, June 22, 1976: 1)
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Lelah Puc Ka Chee
Source: Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), March 10, 1900, 1.
Meskwaki Day School, 1909
Source: Library of Congress
Meskwaki Settlement School, 2023
Lelah Puc Ka Chee was a Meskwaki Indian girl who lived in Iowa from 1873 to 1902. In 1899, when Lelah was 16 years old, her newly wedded husband filed a writ of habeas corpus petition in a federal court, seeking Lelah’s release from the Sauk and Fox Indian Training School, a federal boarding school located in Tama County, Iowa. The presiding federal judge, Oliver Shiras ordered the boarding school to release Lelah from confinement but did not order her to be returned to her husband or her tribe. Judge Shiras ruled that the Indian Agents did not have the authority to remove Lelah from her family and compel her to attend the boarding school. At the same time, the judge rejected the tribe’s assertion of authority over Lelah’s education and Lelah’s husband’s claim for control of Lelah’s life. Judge Shiras held that whether Lelah should go to school was a decision for Lelah’s mother and Lelah to make based on “the true interest of the Indian girl.” Lelah left the Indian boarding school on the fourth day of the 20th century. She died a year later in a smallpox epidemic due to her tribe’s refusal to receive vaccination and medical treatment. The local white community supported Lelah’s husband’s legal efforts but faulted the judge and the tribe for Lelah’s death. The boarding school was closed within a few years after Lelah’s death and was replaced by a federally funded day school in the Meskwaki village. The day school has been a beloved institution of the Meskwakis’ for over a century. In the past centuries, American Indians had repeatedly brought lawsuits against the U.S. government’s Indian education policies and practices. However, American Indigenous families’ strategic and successful lawsuits against coercive Indian education practices in local courts have been absent in the historiography of American Indian education. This project is an effort to uncover American Indian families and tribes’ instrumental and indispensable role in producing and disseminating an ideal of pluralistic education through strategic litigation. By reconstructing the discourse on Lelah’s case in Judge Shiras’s courtroom and the local press, this project investigates how the Meskwaki people galvanized local support and successfully instigated Lelah’s case against the forceable removal of Meskwaki children to an Indian boarding school. It explores the multiplicity of indigenous girls and women’s resistance and opposition against both racial and gender oppressions at a time when the U.S. government intensified its efforts in assimilation of the American indigenous peoples as well as modernization of the country. It examines the tension between the courts’ commitment to uphold legal norms, such as the best interest of the child, and their willingness to depart from these norms for colonial interests. Historian Richard White wrote, “The meeting of European colonizers and the peoples that they colonized, like the meeting of sea and continent, destroys as well as creates. Colonization was not a battle of primal forces in which one kills another and only one could survive. Something new could arise.” This project argues that the new thing arose from the Meskwakis’ lawsuit against coercive assimilation is the ideal of pluralistic, multicultural education.
Many countries around the world have joined the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (the “Hague Convention”) and adopted domestic laws to prevent parents’ unilateral removal or retention of children across national borders. The Hague Convention together with its member countries’ domestic laws forms a legal regime base on the premise that a set of uniform procedural rules can guarantee the immediate return of a child to the country from which he/she has been unilaterally removed by one parent. The Convention prohibits courts from considering the best interests of the child – the guiding principle of child protection laws in the modern age. This project analyzes the tension between procedural expediency and the need to protect fundamental rights by critically examining the drafting history of the Hague Convention, historical data of the operation of the Convention, and the records of a recent child custody case in which a Pakistani mother was prohibited from leaving the United States with her daughter under Michigan’s international child abduction prevention legislation. It finds that the Hague regime is ineffective in deterring international parental abductions, and at times has been found to be harmful to children’s best interests because of its failure to recognize the social, economic, and cultural differences among its member countries. In the name of international child abduction prevention, the Hague regime violates children’s rights by severely restricting and, in some jurisdictions, by banning their contact with their parents who have ties with non-Hague signatory countries, whose family laws are often characterized as in violation of fundamental principles of human rights under the Hague regime. The Hague regime’s systemic failures raise the question whether the Hague regime can or should survive as a universal solution to international parental child abduction, a global problem occurring across legal systems and legal cultures. This essay contends that for the Hague regime to survive, it must incorporate the values adopted in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, including but not limited to the best interest of the child standard.
Gary Wendt (former GE Capital’s CEO) and Lorna Wendt’s divorce case was rigorously litigated both in the court of law and the court of public opinion. The key contention between the Wendts’ case was the value of Lorna’s nonmonetary contribution to Gary’s successful career. Lorna posed a provocative question in her interview with Fortune Magazine: what’s a corporate wife worth? Both parties introduced Gary Becker’s family economics in the attempt to answer Lorna’s question. When the parties waited for over a year for the court to set a number, Gary Becker was asked the question. He, too, could not give a concrete answer. Then, what’s the appeal of Becker’s family economics? This study argues that Beker’s family economics became a theoretical foundation of American family law and policy in the late twentieth-century United States because both feminist reformers and conservatives embraced it. By juxtaposing the family law reform in the 1980s’ divorce revolution with the history of Becker’s family economics and the public discourse on racial and gender economic inequality, this project investigate how Gary Becker’s family economics theories gained acceptance and rose to dominance. This study argues that Becker successfully theorized and affirmed the long-held American male breadwinner ideal as a natural order of household economy, not by subsuming women within its boundaries or rendering their role secondary to their husbands, but by placing a market value on their unpaid, nonmarket household work and elevating them to equal economic partners of their husbands. Becker’s breadwinner economics provided theoretical grounds for the conservative movement in the 1980s by lending legitimacy and even prestige to the alleged normalcy and naturalness in sharp gendered division of labor both in the household and the labor market. At the same time, Becker’s family economics was instrumental to liberal causes, such as economic compensation for women’s unpaid domestic work and public education because it assigns market value to “homemaking” and “parenting” and makes it possible to measure economic contributions between marital partners without disturbing the gender status quo in American society. Through close reading of Wendt v. Wendt, this project illustrates the myriad ways that Becker’s neoliberal economic theories have shaped family law legislations and judicial decisions. Finally, this study argues that wrapped in Becker’s family economics theories, American divorce law, albeit gender neutral on the surface, reinforces the ideal of sharp gendered division of labor at home and in the market.
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