The award-winning book Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America (Princeton University Press 2011), co-authored by Joanna L. Grossman, the Sidney and Walter Siben Distinguished Professor of Family Law, and Lawrence M. Friedman of Stanford Law School, was released in paperback in November 2014.
The book, a co-winner of the 2011 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, is a comprehensive social history of 20th-century family law in the United States.
The authors show how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with their own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life.