http://um.umaryland.edu/news/?p=204
"I think it is a big change," says University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law professor Martha Ertman, "it's gone from why to why not?" At a recent conference she organized on same-sex marriage equality she added that the story goes beyond the Supreme Court saying, "I think the demographic is changing and the story we tell about ourselves and each other is changing. So we want to get law to catch up with that." Ertman sees the Supreme Court's expected rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act (Gill vs. Office of Personnel Management) and California's Proposition 8 (Perry vs. Brown) as critical moments in this evolution.
Ertman teaches students in Maryland, which enacted the Marriage Civil Protection Act this year, legalizing same-sex marriage.
Martha M. Ertman is the Carole & Hanan Sibel Research Professor and teaches Contracts, Commercial Law and Contract Drafting courses and writes about the role of contracts and mini-contracts she calls "deals" in family relationships.
Her law review articles and book chapters uncover on the often-hidden role of contracts and deals in the legal rules governing the value of homemaking labor, what she calls "Plan B" baby-making through reproductive technologies, and polygamy, and her book Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture (with Joan Williams (NYU Press 2005) explores the reach of markets into all areas of our lives.
Public presentations of her work include a New America Foundation panel on same-sex marriage and her current book project, Love & Contracts: the HEART of the Deal, also seeks to reach readers outside law schools by blending memoir with family law stories about exchanges in reproductive technology, adoption, cohabitation and marriage. (You can view an excerpt of that memoir, Presentation #7 »).
Before joining the Carey law faculty in 2007, Professor Ertman taught at University of Utah and University of Denver law schools, and has also visited at the universities of Michigan, Connecticut, and Oregon. Before entering academia, she clerked for the Honorable Peter H. Beer, a U.S. district court judge in Louisiana, and practiced law in Denver and Seattle. In 2013-14, Prof. Ertman will teach Secured Transactions and Contract Drafting.
JD, 1990, Northwestern University
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