Almost by definition, households combine a wide range of caring attentions and economic transactions. Members provide each other with health care, child-care advice, information, and numerous other services. At the same time, they engage incessantly in produc­tion, consumption, distribution, and financial transfers. Feeding the family provides an obvious yet often forgotten intersection of caring and […]

In the commercialized United States of the early twenty-first cen­tury, then, household members still remain the principal providers of care to other household members. No doubt that household con­centration of caring services reinforces the supposition of a sharp division between the diffuse, sentimental, and noncommercial world of the family and the specialized, impersonal, and commercialized […]

Estimating her net worth at $2.4 billion, in 2001 Forbes magazine rated Barbara Piasecka Johnson among the world’s twenty wealthi­est women. Forty years earlier, the young, impoverished Barbara Piasecka had arrived in the United States from her native Poland and worked as a cook. In between, however, she had married medical and baby products heir […]

Precisely because courts proceed in this way, a significant share of contestation between and about couples in American law turns less on what actually happened than on what relationship prevailed when it happened, and what separated that relationship from others it resembled in some regards. As we saw earlier, outside of the legal process couples […]

American law does not, however, give professionals a free ride. On the contrary, it regulates intimate professional-client relations closely. As we saw in the lawyer-client-bar association case that opened this chapter, professional organizations, courts, and legisla­tures collaborate in protecting the boundary of professional practice against two kinds of violations. The first defends against forms of […]

Legal efforts to classify varying forms of sex-for-money relation­ships go farther than criminal prostitution or income tax evasion. The case of lap dancing, for instance, has created a great deal of controversy precisely as a result of its uncertain legal status. Uncer­tainty begins with the entertainment’s very name. Professionals pre­fer to call the practice exotic […]

In the Vandevelde-Colucci case, much of the dispute hinged on whether their relationship qualified as commercial sex work. Plenty of disputes arise, however, in cases where there is little question that part of what was going on was the commercial provision of sexual services. As we have seen, sex work covers a wide range of […]

Across this complex, fascinating terrain, American courts continue to follow the strategy of relational work outlined earlier: They match intimate relations with appropriate economic transactions and media, they distinguish similar relations from each other, and they often justify their distinctions by invoking hostile worlds doc­trines. Although they maintain a distinctive legal classification of intimate relations […]

Courts did not, however, withdraw from legal regulation of engage­ments. Instead, the broader breach of promise action was restricted to legal adjudication of property transactions between the engaged couple. Within this narrower focus, legal issues continue to pivot on such questions as: Was this relation an engagement? What eco­nomic transactions belong to an engaged couple? […]

Suits for breach of promise reflected this evolution. American states have always varied widely in their treatment of such suits, but on the whole, state courts became more receptive to large settlements for breach of promise as the nineteenth century wore on, then re­versed direction during the twentieth century. Breach of promise suits, a mixture […]