A forthcoming law review article by Professor Rama Kim was featured in a review in Jotwell. Jotwell is an online journal edited by a group of legal scholars that provides a forum to “identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new scholarship relevant to the law.”

The review, written by Georgetown Law Professor and family law expert Philomila Tsoukala, examines Professor Kim’s forthcoming article, Parents, Kin, and the State: Family and Households Between Functional Parenthood and Child Protection. The article engages with the ongoing debate in family law surrounding the legal recognition of “functional parenthood,” or informal caregiving relationships that resemble legal parenthood.

While the recognition of functional parenthood is often viewed as an unqualified normative good in family law literature, Professor Kim’s article challenges this assumption. Drawing on an in-depth case study of Kentucky law, it examines how such legal recognition can operate for families susceptible to intervention by child protection agencies. As Professor Tsoukala notes, the article “suggests that the costs of this model are real and uneven,” and that “functional parenthood can burden parent–child relationships in poor and racialized communities.”

Professor Tsoukala calls the work an “important contribution” that “resists easy resolutions.” She writes that Kim’s “core claim is not that functional recognition is always wrong, but rather that its use in child-protection contexts brings distributional consequences that much of the reform literature has not fully considered.”

The review concludes: “In this important contribution, Kim reminds us that the future of family justice depends not only on recognizing care, but on deciding whose care counts and on what terms.”

Professor Kim’s forthcoming article is: Rama Hyeweon Kim, Parents, Kin, and the State: Family and Households Between Functional Parenthood and Child Protection, 33 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y ___ (forthcoming, 2025).