Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Bonus Episode: Taboo Children with Sean Williams
My UVA colleague, Gregg Strauss, and I interview Sean Williams, of the University of Texas School of Law about his new paper "Sacred Children and Taboo Trade Offs"
Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast! As regular listeners know, I’ve sadly had to say goodbye to the amazing group of students who were my co-hosts for Season 2. But I decided to do a couple of bonus episodes this summer, and this is the first, featuring Sean Williams of the University of Texas School of Law. I also have a very special co-host, one of my favorite colleagues at UVA Law, Gregg Strauss.
Sean Williams studies decision making dynamics in a wide variety of areas including marriage markets, parental investments in child safety, jury damage awards, and consumer contracts. He writes widely on Family Law, Tort Theory, and Behavioral Law and Economics. Today we’re discussing his new working paper, “Sacred Children and Taboo Tradeoffs,” which is downloadable from SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4163131
Gregg Strauss is with me at the University of Virginia school of law. He is both a lawyer and a philosopher, and studies the limits of legitimate law in situations of fundamental disagreement, with an emphasis on familial relationships.
The whole podcast is about taboo trade-offs that we don't admit we make, but we do. So we are making these trade-offs.
SPEAKER_05:Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades Podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravick. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast. As regular listeners know, I've sadly had to say goodbye to the amazing group of students who were my co-hosts for season two. But I decided to do a couple of bonus episodes this summer, and this is the first, featuring Sean Williams of the University of Texas School of Law. I also have a very special co-host, one of my favorite colleagues at UVA Law, Greg Strauss. Sean Williams studies decision-making dynamics in a wide variety of areas, including marriage markets, parental investments in child safety, jury damage awards, and consumer contracts. He writes widely on family law, tort theory, and behavioral law and economics. Today, we're discussing his new working paper, Sacred Children and Taboo Trade-offs, which is downloadable from SSRN, and if you check the show notes, I've left a link for you there. Greg Strauss, as I said, is with me at the University of Virginia School of Law. He's both a lawyer and a Hey, Sean. There we go. Hey. How are you?
SPEAKER_03:I'm doing well. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_05:Here's Greg. Hey, Greg. Welcome to both of you. And it's so nice to have a chance to talk with not one, but two great scholars today. I'm so excited about it. And Sean, thanks a lot. Yeah, thanks for being willing to share this really interesting draft paper. Because this is not a paper that's already out there, I'm going to give you a chance to just talk a little bit about the paper so that listeners will have some background for it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, thanks. So the primary claim of the paper is that the psychological research on taboo trade-offs or maybe at least some reasonable extrapolations from that research can illuminate some patterns in public discourse around family law. So the standard example of a taboo trade-off, as you know, as your listeners know, involves trading money against a sacred value. So how much would you be willing to accept to sell this baby? for example. Now, my work isn't talking about monetary trade-offs. Rather than thinking about the trade-off between money and sacred goods, I'm talking about the trade-offs between two sacred values, mainly adult welfare and child welfare. Now, at first blush, readers familiar with this literature might think this is a tragic trade-off, but it turns out that child welfare is going to be more sacred than adult welfare, and that's going to matter. So the first part of the paper argues that child welfare is sufficiently more sacred than adult welfare. adult welfare, that it makes sense to think of them as different spheres and that trade-offs between them would be taboo. And so please indulge me for a moment. I want to tell you a story about my mechanic and my 1996 Honda Accord station wagon. So our mechanic serviced that car for years and always proved himself to be exceedingly honest. One day he noticed a car seat in the back of that car. And he rightly concluded that we had had our first child. So he congratulated me. And then he recommended a long list of updates and repairs that before he said, yeah, you don't really need these. So apparently my life wasn't worth very much and my wife's life wasn't worth very much. But as soon as a baby was riding in that car, everything changed. No risk. I think actually that type of judgment is not uncommon. And at least that's when I and many of my new parent friends really went down the rabbit hole of car safety. Okay, so now let me actually talk about this, not in terms of this anecdote. So there are a host of bioethics studies that ask people to allocate scarce livers or vaccines. And the most robust finding is that children get priority over adults. And most recently, researchers explored the ethics that govern autonomous cars. They developed a video game of sorts where a car is driving down the road. It's going to hit a pedestrian. It can swerve, but if it swerves, it's going to hit someone else or it's going to hit a barrier that's going to kill the people in the car. The researchers analyzed 40 million decisions. Three main findings emerge. Number one, subjects choose to save more people over fewer people. Number two, subjects choose to save humans over cats and dogs. Number three, people choose to save children over adults. Now, when researchers measured the magnitude of those differences, they found that the interest of children were elevated above the interest of adults to about the same extent that the interests of adults are elevated above the interests of cats. And I think that bears repeating. So if you think that human life is clearly more sacred than animal life, as many but not all people do, then the study strongly suggests that child lives are clearly more safe.
SPEAKER_05:I'm glad you're emphasizing this point. Just to jump in here, this was, to me, one of the more striking things about your discussion of some of the research. I mean, to me, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that we sort of privilege child welfare or child lives over those of adults. But the magnitude of it, I actually found to be pretty shocking.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And one of the things I really like about the study is that it turns out that dogs are significantly more valuable than cats, you know, sort of vindicates my world.
SPEAKER_05:Okay, but that one makes sense.
SPEAKER_03:Come on. Yeah, the magnitude is quite large in these studies. And that's why I think that these trade-offs probably do take on some of the features of taboo trade-offs. And from that point, we can think, well, there are certain ways that people respond to taboo trade-offs. And so we can make some predictions and see whether they hold for family law discourse about child welfare. And so I'm just going to give you one example to start off. So taboo trade-offs are difficult to face. And so family law academics here might be likely to deny that any trade-off exists. They might adopt creative arguments that suggest, well, you know, at first it might appear that adult interests and child interests are in tension, but a proper view is going to reveal that these interests really align. And I call this arguments of alignment. And we see them in family law scholarships. And my example here is parental rights. So parental rights should often entail conflicts between parents and children. Corporal punishment is a clear example. Many scholars assert that giving these parents broad rights, well, it's actually good for children because it makes parents more likely to take their roles. Contrast disempowering them might make them less engaged. Now, that asserted alignment is questionable. And one way to see that is to note that if there is a positive relationship between parental power and child well-being, then we should be arguing for more robust parental rights. We should be arguing for more severe corporal punishment, or at least the capacity to do it, and more control over one's children. But family law scholars don't do that. And they don't even discuss that as a possibility. They assert the alignment, but they don't subject it to the scrutiny that other arguments would get in. And here, I think we're seeing evidence of Tetlock's early assertion that people are not resolute defenders of the sacred. They happily endorse sort of thin smoke screens to avoid engaging. And here, that example and others in the paper suggest that the sacred nature of child welfare is distorting family law arguments and family law discourse. And that's a problem. if you value open and honest debate. What can we do about it? The paper's a little skeptical that we're gonna find any big solutions, but I talked about several in the paper. Yeah, that's a
SPEAKER_02:particularly surprising point for the obfuscation to occur. And so the scholars that you're talking about are scholars who are advocating for greater use of empirical research, more emphasis on grounded empirical research about child welfare, and using that to guide our policymaking as opposed to sort of intuitions about. And so why does it occur? I mean, why would it occur there? Why would it occur in the people who are most determined to be explicit and most determined to ground their research in empirical studies? Why are they still making the same sort of mistakes? Right,
SPEAKER_03:and I'd say there are multiple of my examples contain these ironies, okay? So the irony that you point out is that, you know, one of the papers I'm responding to is specifically talking about, look, we shouldn't be making claims about family law that don't have solid empirical grounding. And we shouldn't make claims about child welfare that don't have solid empirical basis. And therefore, you know, the authors there say, so we shouldn't ban spanking. because the empirical evidence is unclear about whether spanking is bad or good overall. And it's sort of ironic that they also have these assertions in there about, well, you know, this place where we happen to be in parental rights is probably exactly where we would be if all we cared about is child welfare. That would be a Radically strange coincidence. And it would mean that we weren't quite in the right place 10 years ago and we may not be in the right place 10 years from now. And I think all of this just speaks to the power of the way that people are so motivated to deny them, to reject this hard question. that even the most resolute, the most careful people are still succumbing. And again, we see this in other examples as well, that people who have recognized the irony and the error of claims of alignment in other parts of their research will assert one here. And again, I think it's just, there's a visceral reaction to these taboo trade-offs and there might be some signaling going on too. And I always think about Richard Posner. Richard Posner will forever be disqualified from the moral community of family law because he proposed selling babies. And as we write our family law articles or as judges write their family law opinions, they're signaling their membership in certain moral communities and their distance from others. moral community. And so I think that sort of siding with children or saying that our current laws fully maximize child welfare is a way of signaling your commitment to child welfare. And to actually try to engage with the taboo trade-off would be to threaten one's place in that moral order. Because just contemplating a taboo trade-off results in moral outrage, as in people feel morally contaminated when they do it. And they understand that others will judge them harshly if they even linger over it. So people look for easy answers.
SPEAKER_05:So, Sean, what does that say then? I mean, you're skeptical yourself of that there are any big proposals that can be done to address this problem. And I sort of share that skepticism in part because of what you just said. Right. The very nature of the taboo to me means it. Well, so I guess maybe first you can discuss sort of what you think some of the solutions might be. But I think I would come back to your Posner example and say... I'm not sure that simply exhorting people to not observe the taboo is going to get us anywhere, just by the very nature of the taboo. And related to that, and Greg, you may want to jump in here as well. As you know, the tabooness is on multiple levels, right? There's a psychological or there's an internal component to it. There's an external sort of norms violation component to it. And for Tetlock, especially writing in the context of political decision makers, there's a political component to it, right? So that decision makers, certainly legislators, but presumably judges as well, just simply can't bear the costs of being open about their violations of the taboo. Which of those, perhaps all of them, do you view as being at work here? And does that matter for what is the answer, right, for how we address this problem? It seems to me that all of them are potential problems. hurdles to having a more transparent and more robust discussion about this. The internal ones, though, strike me as perhaps being more damning. But maybe you've thought through that and sort of have a response to it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, well, so I'll just say I don't share your opinion that the internal discomfort is sort of a bigger problem. I'm a little more agnostic. I'm not sure what the bigger problem is. But maybe I'll come around to your opinion. I think we can agree on that maybe we can change some norms. And I think law professors are uniquely situated here. We're not elected officials. And we have immense job security. So we can actually maybe afford to do some taboo trade-offs. the political consequences for us are far less than the political consequences for a legislator or an elected judge. We like to think of ourselves as above the fray, and the fray here is not just self-interest, but also sort of motivated reasoning and biases. And so it might be that we can actually create a norm among family law professors that says, you know what, if you are making a claim of alignment, you better really defend it. And a norm of, you need to acknowledge your taboo trade-offs. And so it's possible, again, I don't know if it's going to happen, but it's, I think, possible to create norms that force people at least to acknowledge, and we'll see how deep that we go, right? You can acknowledge a taboo trade-off, but then sort of Try to skirt it or try not to look too hard at it or don't really put a whole lot of effort into that part of your paper. And that's, you know, I think that might. But one of the ways that I frame a potential solution is to use the nexus test. Now, what's the nexus test? Well, the family law people know what a nexus test is. So appellate courts were worried that trial courts were using kind of moral judgments of parents to deny custody. So you had an extramarital affair, you're a bad person, you don't get custody, even if they were the primary caretaker. And in order to kind of ferret some of these out, the appellate court said, you know what, we need a nexus test. If you're going to tell me that the parent's sexual behavior is harming the child, tell me exactly why and how. Like, draw the line, connect the dots, and that sort of process of requiring that of trial courts should be de-biased. That's the idea. And today, some folks say, we need a nexus test for trans parents. Just to say gender confusion is not enough. You got to tell me exactly why a parent's transition from one gender to another is going to be harmful. Similarly, we could ask, look, for claims of alignment, we have a nexus test. Tell me exactly. Tell me exactly why these claims align. Tell me where they don't align. Tell me how you could envision them not aligning in various ways. And once you start doing that, then you maybe pull back from those claims of alignment. And at least that's a start.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe that might work for law professors. I don't know. It depends on how often they really engage with one another and actually push them to think carefully. But it seems like that's probably not going to help very much for your court system. So one of the examples that you use is the wrongful conception in the duped father cases. We won't let parents sue a doctor when the doctor's contraceptive methods fail, or we won't let a father sue when he raises someone else's genetic child because the courts say that'll harm the child's welfare. Right? if the child finds out that their parents wanted to sue about their birth and claim that the birth was an injury to the parents, then the child will be psychologically harmed. So they've made a child welfare-related argument. But in part motivated by exactly the tab that you're talking about, the reverse, a different kind of problem. They're not going to investigate the depth of the of the child welfare claim or the countervailing interests.
SPEAKER_03:That's precisely right, I think. So we can imagine multiple responses to taboo trade-offs. My example was, let's deny a trade-off exists. An example that you're reflecting back at me, the courts are like, well, no, we could do a trade-off here, but I'm just going to side with the more sacred value. And that's exactly what you should expect from sort of public engagement with taboo trade-offs. If you admit there's a taboo trade-off, That is, there's a trade-off between the child's interests and the adult's interests in a particular court suit. Then you just side with the more sacred value. That's the only viable option for elected officials to take. And so I agree with you. And this is why the paper, if you're looking for a solution, the paper, it might be a little depressing because the paper is somewhat pessimistic about the capacity of elected officials, both legislators and judges, to make these taboo trade-offs. Now, we could get some progress, I think, incomplete progress toward transparency if a lot of law professors started writing, well, you know, this makes no sense. It might be that fewer courts would adopt that logic. I think the results would be the same, but maybe they would... use more plausible logic? I'm not sure. Maybe we would see a couple of courts flip, right? And that would be maybe some progress as in a couple of courts saying, okay, that logic doesn't work. Maybe I'll allow the tort suit to go forward. after all.
SPEAKER_05:So, Sean, I guess that brings me back to, I guess I'm like you, I'm agnostic as to which of these internal versus social versus political is the bigger hurdle. But I guess I'll come back to why I initially raised the Yeah. questioning of who am I as a moral human being that many taboo trades do. And so, I mean, that might work in your favor, right? That it's something that is operating out there, but perhaps not at the same level as some of the taboos that, for example, Tetlock first discussed, or maybe it's in flux. I mean, I just, I'm just sort of pointing out that I think that the the way in which you're articulating the internal component of it is different from some of the more traditional taboo trades. And that may be because this taboo is different, which means that your interventions may have a higher probability of success.
SPEAKER_03:Right. And so let me just start by saying I 100% agree with you that when I'm saying that trading off child welfare or adult welfare is taboo, It's not exactly the same types of taboo that we've been talking about, that Tetlock's been talking about, that Barron talked about with protected values. Those were monetary trade-offs. And should you monetize human life or monetize friendship, things like that? Should you sell a baby? Should you sell the Grand Canyon? This is different because it pits a sacred value against another sacred value. Although I'm now, so we can think about this as, or hypothesizing or extending the taboo trade-off framework to a grayer space. And so I think you're right that it's not clear exactly whether all the same sort of responses will arise. I suspect a lot of them will, because I think the analogy is strong, although imperfect. But you're right that for Richard Posner to say, well, money is the master of all. It doesn't look so good. But for someone to say, all people are equal. So that's a way of resolving the trade-off in some ways by saying, no, I reject the extra sacredness of child violence with a principle that sounds really good. All people should be equal. That move is available for this trade-off in a way that it's not available For some others. And that move might make it a little bit more palatable to conduct the training. And so in an article I wrote a while ago now called Statistical Children, I talked about cost benefit analysis. And so this is kind of what Tetlock talks about. He says, you know what? If you're going to monetize human life, you can't do it in the legislature. You've got to ship it off to some insulated bureaucracy. So there we go. There's our cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether we should have backup cameras on cars. How many people cost$500 per car? That's X dollars, millions of dollars. It's going to save Y number of people. Is that worth it? When the value of a human life is$10 million. Yes. Okay. Then I have that backup. And in that paper, I said, well, how should we treat children? Right. And backup cameras on cars is the example because who died kids. Why? Because they were shorter than the trunk of the car. And so there were a lot of parents who were killing their own children. About 100 or 200 a year. That's a lot of terrible tragedies. And the argument essentially there was, if we look at studies of how parents actually behave, how they actually invest money in safety within the family, we see a pretty standard pattern, which is you spend about twice as much on child safety as adults. If you look at these bioethics studies that I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, Some of them try to quantify the extra value put on child lives. They come to roughly the same conclusion, which is children are worth about twice as much. And so I said, well, look, we should use that in cost benefit. And there, you know, we might imagine maybe that's a pathway. I'm a little skeptical that that's a pathway, but maybe it's a pathway for people to actually do the taboo tradeoff. Because now you say, well, I acknowledge that. that child welfare is more sacred. But I'm trying to give a way to actually do the trade-off as well, right? In a way that acknowledges one thing is more important than the other, but there is an exchange rate between them. And that's, again, possible here in a way it's not possible with the money examples.
SPEAKER_05:Right, right. To even acknowledge the exchange rate in some of the taboo trade is the taboo, right? Yes. Now,
SPEAKER_03:I think that people would think my article on statistical children, I'm afraid that some people might think of me as Richard Posner. And so I'm not, I'm not really sure that that's going to work, but there's a shot that it, that it might. Now in this paper, you know, I, I, I relegate that to a footnote because, because I, I, I don't hold out a lot of hope for that.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But maybe, you know, what we need here is some norm entrepreneurs or, you know, as Zelizer would say, some relational work. Like maybe there's some work that can be done to sort of figure out a way to make these trade-offs semi-openly, right, with certain patterns or rituals. But I haven't figured, I haven't seen anything yet. I've been looking for it. I haven't seen any evidence of that yet.
SPEAKER_05:This is helpful for me, as was your introduction, because one of the questions I had with the paper, which I think you've helped to answer at least a little bit, is what exactly the trade-off was here, right? As you mentioned in the Typically, what the taboo nature is, is that you're trading off some sacred value, in this case, child welfare or child well-being against some profane one, which in the typical in the Tetlock taxonomy is often money. And so one of the things that I wasn't sure about is what is the profane thing? in this instance? Is it anything, or is it specifically adult welfare? Is any trade off of child wellbeing the profane thing, or is it more specific than that?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I think we can go back to that initial framework that Fisk and Tetlock put forth in their 1997 paper. And they say, we're gonna see elements of resistance to trades whenever we sort of cross these sort of, these schema boundaries. And the two that are furthest apart in his model are money and what he calls communal sharing, which is a catch-all for a lot of different stuff, but stuff we don't allocate by money necessarily. Love, justice, votes, lives. But he does talk about... systems where goods are allocated by authority and systems where goods are allocated by equity matching, like kind of a tit for tat, like you do me a favor, I do you a favor.
SPEAKER_05:There's four schema, if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_03:And he suggests that, you know, we're going to find resistance depending on the distance. So naturally, he takes the low hanging fruit, right? The money, the most secular versus, you know, child death and things like that. the most, maybe the most sacred, some of the most sacred. So I would suspect that whenever we're talking about child welfare, if you're talking about child welfare and money, that's a problem, right? That's gonna be a taboo trade-off. And in fact, what you see, and Greg can step in here too, like when I read philosophy papers and they're trying to prime the pump with examples, often they use kids as victims somehow, or a kid is gonna get hurt. And I think that's cheating. because of this thing that kids are more valuable than adults. And if that's true, then sort of stack in the deck already in one way. And maybe in these examples and philosophical discussions, they should just use adults as our standard bearer of whatever misfortune is going to befall them. Yeah. And anyway, sort of I'm not sure if I responded to your... Can I
SPEAKER_02:ask about an example? So I don't know if you were listening, but we were doing a conference on Fulton, the case about whether a religious adoption agency could discriminate against prospective foster parents on the basis of their religious beliefs. And in the oral argument at the Supreme Court, there was this moment where the advocate... Jeffrey Fisher from the Stanford Supreme Court Clinic was trying to defend– was defending the right of Philadelphia to enforce its anti-discrimination laws
SPEAKER_04:and
SPEAKER_02:to say you can't discriminate against lesbian and gay parent– prospective foster parents under our city ordinance. And Justice Thomas' response was essentially doesn't everything having to do with children have to be justified by the best interest of the child standard? not just the individual decisions in a particular case, but the structure for deciding who gets to be foster parents has to be done in the best interest of the child. And so you can't, Philadelphia, even consider the possibility of reducing the pool of prospective foster parents. You can't, if you lose Catholic social services because they don't want to participate anymore, you're going to reduce the pool of foster kids and overall everyone all foster children are going to be worse off how could you possibly do that right it's a moment where it seems like um it seems like child welfare has to trump everything even other values that that would have sort of equal status right dignitarian values about equality about um
SPEAKER_03:yeah let me say say two things um the first more directly responsive. So it's a very interesting thing for Thomas to say, I think, because, you know, as you know, Greg, we don't allocate parental rights by the best interest of the child at all, right? And so the first and most important decision we make for children, as in who are they going to be their legal parents, has nothing to do with their best interest. It has to do, you know, I think as a pragmatist, I'm going to say with natural law, you know, with our sort of assumptions about, or ghosts of natural law still controlling our understanding of who a parent is. And so to say all things have to be best interests, it's an interesting claim. It is a claim that some family law folks make, right? They say, look, we have parents, we assign parentage to these people, and all that is consistent with the best interest. So I think it has this pull that you're right, that everyone wants best interest to trump everything. at least in the siloed area of family law. And yes, and so we can see also whenever we have Supreme Court cases that talk about narrow tailoring that deal with kids, right? We need an important government interest or a compelling government interest. And if there's a kid involved, that takes about a sentence. They say, of course it's a, Of course it is. And then the question always hinges on the tailoring part, not the magnitude. And that's, I think, evidence as well, that child welfare just trumps everything. Or at least it's not lesser than anything. So we might have some ties. And so James Dwyer talks about child welfare policies and the CPS, Child Protective Services system, And he talks about what he calls liberals and their adult-centered views, where they want to preserve families at the cost of maybe harming children. And here, I think it's maybe not the best way to think of the conflict that he talks about. A better way to think about it is liberals have a sacred commitment, basically a commitment to racial justice and a commitment to child welfare, and those, in James's opinion, collide. And liberals can't have them collide. That collision can't be resolved. And so you have to look for ways of saying, no, no, no, we can do all of it. We can salvage all of it. So I might not say that child welfare trumps everything, but I don't think anything is above it. We might have that again sometimes. Now let me just say one other thing about Greg's comment that I thought was fascinating. So Thomas is basically saying, look, there is, this is how I'm going to re-describe it, there's a deontological conception of child welfare and a consequentialist one. And so for this particular child, or you can say a consequentialist view that narrows it down to one child and then an aggregate consequence, right? So for this one child, you should not be discriminating against lesbian parents because they might be the best parents for this one child. Then for the aggregate number of children, Thomas's argument, at least you can trade it, was you should allow this discrimination because it'll help children in the act. And this is one of the interesting things about this sacred value is that it, I think it does rely in some regard on abstraction. Once you concretize it and say exactly
SPEAKER_04:what you mean,
SPEAKER_03:I think most of those are gonna be sacred values, but it's at least not clear that we're all gonna agree on which one is more sacred or which one is the better one.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. But it cut off the, I think you're right, that it cuts off the policymaking at the institutional level, the aggregate, right? So they, even Fisher, essentially, after a while, concedes and says, yes, the whole thing has to be designed in the best interest of children overall. When it was totally in his client's interest to insist, no, we can enforce discrimination laws even if it comes at some cost
SPEAKER_03:That is interesting. And I'll have to take a look at that oral argument because that is not a concession I would want to make. And that is a concession that I would predict you would make based on this paper and a concession that I would resist. My
SPEAKER_05:editing skills are up to it. I'm going to put a clip of that section of the oral argument that Greg just alluded to in our podcast so that people can hear it. But if it's not there when you guys are listening, it is because I'm not good enough. I
SPEAKER_01:promise. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice. Mr. Fisher, I want to go back to the assessment of the pool, as Mr. Katyal designated it, and the placement. Do you agree with him that both of these have to be looked at in the best interest of the child?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think just to be precise, Justice Thomas, the state law best interest of the child test applies only at the placement stage. That's unique to the placement stage. I think what Mr. Cashaw was saying is that, of course, the city and the state are going to establish rules for family certification at the outset in the general interest of children. But specifically speaking, the best interest of the child test that comes into matching, and just as under federal law and under other state laws, applies only
SPEAKER_01:Excuse me. I'm sorry to interrupt you. It's just we're short on time. So what would be the standard? Why the assessment of the family? If you say statutorily it's only the placement that's in the best interest of the child, what's the policy behind assessing the family?
SPEAKER_00:The idea behind assessing the family goes to the core of the reason why this is a city program is that these are children in city custody. And so the city is establishing criteria that are going to govern which people are allowed to undertake that. No, I mean,
SPEAKER_01:generally, what are you looking
SPEAKER_00:for? You're looking for people that can provide care and loving environments and safe environments to kids. And why are you
SPEAKER_01:looking for that kind of a family?
SPEAKER_00:Pardon me?
SPEAKER_01:Isn't that ultimately just for the best interest of the child?
SPEAKER_00:I think that's one way to think about it, Justice Thomas, which is why I think Mr. Cashel answered your question that way. I'm just trying to be precise about the way the law works here, which is that the standards for certification are laid out in Pennsylvania Code Section 3700.64, and the best interest of the child standard is not present there. It's simply a list of secular criteria that the agencies are being asked to apply. Sorry, I
SPEAKER_03:cut
SPEAKER_05:you
SPEAKER_03:off, Sean. Keep going. No, no. is a response to sort of a building frustration I had with a lot of family law arguments. Again, public family law discourse, right? Whether in courts or in legal scholarship. That seemed to always put children first and not weight other interests even remotely closely. And often to assert that they weren't really doing that. I mean, I'd be more okay with it if they just said, yes, I have a principle that says children first and here are the implications that are counterintuitive and here's why i'm still sticking with it that's fine right now but it's just this kind of slipperiness i think there's something to be said for we can and should and do compromise child welfare or other values right i mean the whole podcast is about taboo trade-offs that we don't admit we make but we do right so we are making these trade-offs And we make them for a bunch of reasons, right? For parental religious liberty. Or we might make them for notions of equality, right? We might think that certain types of trade-offs are okay. And the example I give in the paper is, you know, what if a mother is trying to sue because she's been excluded from some men's only club? That tort suit, let's just say, will predictably harm her child, right? Social ostracism and just as much as you want, death threats, right? Some very reputable men's only club in Everett. Is that a reason to deny her ability to bring the tort suit? And I think most people would say no, even though they might be uncomfortable doing so. They'd say no, but that's an interesting thing to say when, If we flip it into the family law space, scholars and judges say yes.
SPEAKER_05:This was something that interested me in your paper. And I guess you had that example and you had some examples sort of near the end of the paper as well, where, you know, putting somebody in prison for murder when they have a child. We're clearly comfortable with these actions that without even discussing them, it seems to me, right, that are going to diminish child welfare. And nobody thinks that's problematic. And, you know, one theory that you had in the paper was as we get further away from the family law space, the analysis starts looking different. And I mean, that seems... correct to me based on the examples you use it did prompt me though to press you a little bit about what you like it's obvious what the sacred part is but not obvious to me what the profane part is and it just sort of you know is it something specific in these family law cases that is profane in a way that the other examples you're referencing are not in other words you know what's part of it could just be family law people are weird and they have their own way of talking about things it seems more likely to me that there is a particular trade-off occurring there that is particularly problematic for people that's not present in the other examples that prompted me to ask you not what the sacred part is, but what is the profane part. It doesn't strike me as being all trade-offs of child well-being or child welfare. It strikes me as being trade-offs within the context of particular other rights, perhaps within the context of particular other relationships. I don't know. That's a question for you, but I just wasn't sure what explained it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And I'm not going to be able to give a satisfactory response here in some way, right? I think our conversation from before, which is these are a little different. And a little different in ways that maybe we can't identify a profane. And what's the profane? Maybe there isn't one, but there's still other elements that look like taboo trade-offs here. As far as where does this apply? I'm
SPEAKER_05:not trying to encourage you to get rid of the taboo analogy, by the way, because that's what makes it related to me.
SPEAKER_03:No, but I like the idea. No, I like it. Let me emphasize I like it. I want to highlight the differences as well. In a paper about open and honest debate, it would be very ironic if I were to try to bury some of these things. So, you know, we can ask... It is, would this trade-off between child welfare and adult welfare play out differently if we had it explicitly in the criminal law context, let's say, right? Or in the tort law context in the example I gave. And there, you know, I think people would resist doing it explicitly quite strongly, right? And I say that in part because when I was a clerk, we had a case and the judge basically said, Guidelines, I don't care about the guidelines. I'm sentencing this mother of a small child to time served and I'm letting her out because of the child. And then it ended up being the government dropped the case because they were concerned that we were gonna say that. And so there is still quite a lot of purchasing to this idea of child welfare. But I think there are norms or canons or sort of standard arguments that are made and accepted in the criminal law spaces and different ones that are made and accepted in the family law spaces. And the ones in the family law space do often center around child welfare and the best interest of the child. And this sort of creates a space where It's especially easy to say child welfare and then not articulate anything
SPEAKER_04:further
SPEAKER_03:because you just assume everyone knows what you mean and everyone's on board. And in the criminal law space, if you were to assert, well, child welfare, I think people would be like, what? Like, wait, that's... No, we talk about deterrence and retributivism. We don't talk about that thing. So what is that thing? Why are you saying it? I think you're right. There would be different effects in those areas. But I think across the board, no one wants to actually have an upfront discussion to say, well... Here are the ways in which allowing this torture or allowing this fine or allowing this prison sentence will harm children. And yeah, go for it. I love harming those children. As long as I get a certain retributivist bang for my buck for it. Retributivism ignores these punishments, these incidental punishments on third parties.
SPEAKER_04:I'd like to
SPEAKER_03:ask harder to get to get child welfare recognized in that space.
SPEAKER_02:I'd like to ask
SPEAKER_03:a
SPEAKER_02:reflected version of Kim's question, which I'm curious about what it is that's sacred. Because sometimes it's child-like Mm-hmm. And what they're not willing to do is the court is not willing or is trying to avoid putting a value on a relationship and trading that off against the cost of the relationship. So they don't want to allow a father to say, I spent$20,000 raising this 10-year-old and I should get it back. because that would require the court to then say there's a value on the relationship that they don't, and they want to treat the relationship itself as sort of valueless, priceless. Right,
SPEAKER_03:right, right. And so this is interesting. I think that that probably does play a role, but I don't think it plays the only role here. And so I think there is an adult interest versus child interest tension here as well. And the reason I suspect that anyway is is because we see similar arguments when money is off the table. That is when a father is trying to disestablish paternity. And there, it's just legal status. There's no money. I'm not suing for money. I'm just trying to get out of being a parent. We see the same sort of, no, you can't do that because of child welfare. So even when money is taken off the table, we do see it. We could also, although it would require, I think, relational work, think about, well, a lawsuit, a tort suit for intentional affliction of emotional distress would not be measured by the cost of raising the child. It can be measured by the cost of the emotional distress. And so one could imagine if our sole concern were monetizing the child, we might have seen some courts getting around it. And so that's why I suspect there's probably something else going on as well. But you're right, when I say child welfare and adult welfare, I often... There's a lot of different dimensions of each of those welfares. And we could imagine, you know, child fleeting happiness against adult life. Easy choice, right? Adult life. And so when I say it, most of these trade-offs in the literature are trying to be as similar as possible across. The child's dead or the adult is dead or the child has an illness that is hospitalized for a year. The adult is hospitalized. And we see that child interests are consistently favored. But I do like your point that another current going on here is the more traditional type. That just monetizing, and here, not the child's life necessarily, or maybe the child's life, maybe that's the concern. Or maybe it's the relationship. Parenting. This gets to now just something that Kim said before, you know, are there places where child welfare is especially safe, something like that? And maybe it's in the context of parentage. And maybe it's adult, child, whenever sort of parentage is involved, we import norms of caring for children, of putting their interests ahead of your own. And so maybe in those spaces, this taboo would be especially strong. Again, it's probably, it's assuredly exists outside of that context as well, given that the moral machine experiment with the autonomous car, they were just random people. There was no relationship defined between them.
SPEAKER_05:Thank you so much. with the child, the way in which you can frame this as being, look, it's not that we regretted having you or considered it to be a bad thing, but we were trying to make a better life for you and money helped us. I mean, there are conversations beyond just the impact of, oh, look, there's this suit. And to me, this is a problem that cuts across a lot of the taboo areas, including things like egg and sperm donation, commercial surrogacy, compensated organ donation. In all of these cases, there There's a focus on the expressive effect of the money, which I agree does have an expressive effect, but it's not the only expression that's taking place in any of these contexts. And the success often of the transaction depends on those other expressions, precisely because what is being expressed solely by the money is often taboo.
SPEAKER_03:Right. I agree. that if we're talking about expressive harms to the child, well, the one thing that some court implicitly said when they were an infant has almost no impact on them whatsoever compared to the things their parents tell them every day. And so these arguments are incredibly thin, I think. And the way to sort of reconcile that is to say that the courts don't really maybe Maybe what's happening is the courts are just saying, I, or the legislators are saying, I feel uncomfortable with expressing or allowing an expression to take place that I will attribute to myself in some way. And I don't hear all the other things the parent says to the child. All I hear is I've monetized the child. And I certainly don't think that... particular judge's fragility in that regard as a reason to make a big deal out of these expressive harms.
SPEAKER_02:So as a moral theorist concerned with expressive harms myself, I didn't mean to
SPEAKER_03:downplay all expressive
SPEAKER_02:harms. Just to put them in context. So there's a level of which, is there a difference between saying that the law is recognizing this as a cognizable injury and we sort of tort law does this right it goes along it's not just every harm is compensable right but we recognize categories of injuries and some of them we don't recognize right um for and it seems to me that the judge might not be saying i feel uncomfortable but the law ought not recognize this as an injury right if you if you sort of have some vision about the relation between parents and children as being safe i mean if you have anything that parent-child relationship has a certain sacredness that you're not supposed to monetize and you're not supposed to treat as an injury,
SPEAKER_04:then
SPEAKER_02:the law ought not to recognize that. And that led me to one of my other questions, which is about taboos in general, which is, does the fact that it's a taboo suggest it's wrong? I mean, the weighting, it seems like there's an implicit assumption of when we call this thing a taboo, that means that it's an irrational weighting. That these things are... So if someone wanted to come along and say, yes, we ought not. I'm glad that the judges are not willing to consider this. It's not about them. It's about whatever it is that's important about not recognizing certain kinds of injuries.
SPEAKER_03:Right. And so I'll take the second point first. Um, so one could make an argument and I, and I tried to reject this argument in the paper, um, that, you know, we should elevate the interest of children over the interest of adults explicitly, right. Or at least honestly, right. Right. Um, that we can make a set of arguments for, for why that should be. We could make a set of arguments, why they should get, um, more weight in decision-making or why they should get less priority in decision-making. And as long as we're open and honest about it, then I'm fine with all of it. None of it's about taboo in a sense anymore. The taboo part I do think is related to a feeling that doing the trade is morally wrong and that I can't admit to myself that I'm doing it. And so, again, I think that what we, to call it, I think this may not be exactly what you meant by wrong, but I think to call it a taboo trade-off is to say people think of it as morally wrong And whether it is or not, we can have a discussion about it. But we should have that discussion. And that discussion should be open and honest rather than buried. Yeah. Now you're kind of losing track of your first point there. So apologies. Oh, you say the law ought not. So again, and I think we might quickly devolve into debates about expressive theories of law, the law ought not, is that a statement that the law ought not because why? Because that will tend to have certain consequences for, and here, not the child. So we can say, this is not about expressive harm to the child. That's at the make way. But it's about expressive harms to society more broadly. And to the extent that that's the claim, I am generally skeptical just because people don't know the law and don't care about it. And I am certainly willing to entertain this thought that the law can seep into consciousness and maybe it has a greater capacity to seep into consciousness than private expressions or whatever. even large religious organizations say that. But those are empirical. Now, maybe the expressive argument that you're talking about aren't empirical at all. In which case, then, we just have to either agree or disagree on the underlying principle. To the extent they're expressive, sorry, to the extent they're empirical claims, my prior is always to be like, tell me more. I need a little more before I'm going to believe that changing the law in this way is going to be experienced by people in this particular way that you say it's going because we get there's numerous ways the taboo trade-off literature talks about the numerous ways we can creatively repackage things and so we creatively interpret all sorts of stuff and so there's there's certainly not a direct line between court action and saying you know this is a wrong that's compensable and what it might express.
SPEAKER_05:Sean, if we just take as a given, I'm just going to take it as being correct that there are expressive harms and that you are correct that they don't flow to the child, but if it's true that they flow to society more generally, then I think that's even a more damning critique of the type of analysis that is happening in these cases and perhaps in family law debates more generally, right? Because Now you're actually defending something that may have negative effects on the well-being of a child. by saying that it has these expressive harms to the child when the expressive harms, in your account at least, are actually to society more generally. We're doing the opposite. We're expecting children to bear the cost of living in what is perceived to be a moral or just society. And that is actually even worse, I think, than from your perspective. I'm taking all these empirical points as a given. And if you're right about them, it strikes me as being even worse than just the obfuscated taboo trade-off that you're highlighting in the paper.
SPEAKER_03:I think you're right. I think you make a very nice point that if you can, once you successfully repackage it like that, it seems quite objectionable. I'm going to hurt this child for a slight aggregate benefit across society.
SPEAKER_02:But isn't that, I mean, watch out for your own taboo, right? Isn't that what you would want them to be doing? So you're recognizing, so in this case, I'm going to do something that's going to harm this child, but the judge is claiming, or the academic is claiming, that net social benefit is going to be... improve welfare for all children, right? You want them to be able to accept that trade-off. Like, don't reinforce the taboo by saying, we can't impose on this child in order to benefit everybody else. It's just the speciousness of the general reasoning is the problem.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, so I agree. So the open discussion of the trade-offs is sort of, again, I don't, in the paper, I don't flesh out in detail that open and honest discussion is a good thing, right? I kind of take it as a given. And I'll continue to just take it as a given here. And we can have discussions about the consequences and maybe hiding certain facts is better on some consequentialist view. But again, my prior is, yeah, go ahead and have that discussion. And if it's convincing, then do it. And I don't think we should be precluding these trade-offs. I'd rather have them made in the light of day rather than suppressed.
SPEAKER_02:That's a common problem with the best interest standard, right? So the best interest standard that focuses on just this child in every specific case, it tends to ignore the systemic consequences for all children if you're going to do individualized decision-making in every case. You don't ever get to ask.
UNKNOWN:Right.
SPEAKER_03:These are our classic rules versus standards debate as imported into family law in the 70s about the best interests analysis. Like, wouldn't it be better just to flip a coin? Because it wouldn't get, you know, a particular child case right, but it would be more in the aggregate. It would be less harmful to children because it's the litigation that harms children more than the erroneous decision about which parents to give custody or something like that. And that's, I want to be, I think we should be able to have those discussions. And right now we are not able to even have them. And in the conversation with Kim, it was, I think you're exactly right. Watch out for your own taboo, right? So we can reframe it to use against those courts, right? And so maybe that's why courts aren't making that type of argument because they see where it goes, right? And they can't, They can't say, I'm going to hurt this child for the greater good. You just can't say that in ways that I think you can for adults.
SPEAKER_02:That's
SPEAKER_03:a rule.
SPEAKER_02:There's another Supreme Court case that I think is coming up that's going to raise your problem extremely well and has in the past, the ICWA litigation. Right. Right. The ICWA.
SPEAKER_05:Greg, can you just explain that a little bit to perhaps some listeners who aren't familiar with the litigation?
SPEAKER_02:Sure. So ICWA is the Indian Child Welfare Act. And the United States was for a very long time expressly taking children from Native families to put into institutions. And later, even once they stopped that, they were taking them for reasons of But they were disproportionately on the basis of alleged abuse and neglect. And so Congress steps in and says, no, states, before you take a child, you have to meet a higher standard of proof. And if you take a child from a Native family, you have to first favor their tribe in foster placements and then favor any other Native. There's an order, but it ends up with any other Native family. And that's currently being challenged as a racial issue. categorization or racial classification that violates the equal protection clause. Because that means that some individual children aren't getting adopted by the white families who would like to adopt them because they're supposed to go to some native family somewhere else first.
SPEAKER_03:And it's- It hits the interests of an individual child because the individual child is benefited by having a greater pool, a larger pool of potential parents. for someone to select from against the interests of the tribe here. And here, if we decide it's a political classification, not a racial classification, then we have this idea of the benefits of the group versus the benefits of the child. And I think this is why the rhetoric has been so has been pushing so hard is because it does harm a child or it doesn't even harm a child, but it doesn't maximize their benefits. And here is maybe where there's some wiggle room, right? Harming a child is different than not maximizing their value. Losses are different than gains. And so we can, there might be some wiggle room here. But yeah, I agree that this will be an interesting setup individual child welfare, an individual child's best interest versus an
SPEAKER_02:aggregate. And there's a huge pressure, I think, on behalf of people defending ICWA to argue that this is in fact in favor of the child's interests, that the children have some tie to the tribe and that will in fact overall benefit them, which is an attempt to make an alignment claim because they can't sit squarely on the position that Some children are just not going to be somewhat, their welfare is going to be somewhat diminished in order to maintain the existence of the tribes.
SPEAKER_03:Right. And it does seem, so I will be interested to see, and your reference to Thomas was also, I think, interesting, to what extent these sort of larger amorphous notions of the best interest of the child will affect the Supreme Court. Because usually I think of them as having a much greater effect on family court judges, family law people, first and foremost. And then maybe state law judges who do some family law and some other stuff, but not having that much of an effect on Supreme Court justices. But maybe I am wrong on that score. And there's a lot of ways in which our laws routinely harm children. And I would think that they would see those broader contexts. I just think about, you
SPEAKER_04:know,
SPEAKER_03:even like the Hague Convention on returning children who are kidnapped by one parent internationally. It has, you know, requirements. And so then I'd say, is it just a best interest standard? I mean, no. But is that a problem? Maybe, but I wouldn't have thought so. Or thought all the procedures that were agreed upon would be fine simply because they were agreed
SPEAKER_05:upon. So this is a question that, I mean, actually both of you or either one of you might have insight on this or your answer might be, I'm not a comparativist, Kim. What is wrong with you? Stop asking this type of stuff. But I mean, one of the things that struck me as I was reading this is how Do either of you know whether this sort of taboo nature of trading off any amount of child welfare Is it unique to the American legal system? Because as you know, right, part of the nature of taboos is that they are both culturally and historically dependent. And that is certainly true when it comes to this sort of priceless notion of the child. In fact, you referenced Zelizer earlier, and one of her great books is Pricing the Priceless Child, in which she talks about this very phenomenon.
SPEAKER_03:So the moral machine experiment, that's the 40 million decisions about who the car should kill. was a global experiment. And so this is not responsive to your question of to what extent do child rights, Trump adult rights in law, but it's relevant to this lay morality. So generally, in the appendix, they have some findings that aren't quite direct, but give me something to say here. In the global South, they seem to elevate the interests of children even more than we do. And in collectivist cultures, there is at the very least a strong difference with regards to a child versus adult if the adults include the elderly. Because we might think there's more of an emphasis on respecting elders or more of an emphasis on elder welfare. And to the extent that's true, then the aggregate adult versus child will be different, right? And so one of the things that they asked, one of the parts was elderly versus children, and we saw large differences there.
SPEAKER_05:So if I'm understanding you right, there was less cultural variation about children then there was cultural variation about the valuation of the elderly.
SPEAKER_03:But there was, there was cultural differences about the valuation of children as well. And that one is most clearly seen with the global South. Okay. And, and here, you know, this I think is perfectly consistent, right? I mean, and the early Tetlock work all talks about, well, liberals and conservatives and libertarians all have different notions of what's sacred. And so they've, you know, They experience taboo trade-offs differently. And so we should expect a whole host of cultural factors to moderate what people think of as sacred. And although I would suspect, as I think you probably did when you asked the question, that whether you want to go with an evolutionary biology explanation or global culture or something, kids are probably... their interests are probably elevated higher than adults today. Today,
SPEAKER_05:yeah, exactly. I think I would say today.
SPEAKER_03:200 years ago, when infant mortality was high, maybe we just wait, right? We don't name them until after they live a year. We wait until they're a certain age and then their interests might trump us or then maybe not, right? And this is contingent culturally on the progressive era kind of redefinition of what it means to be a child. It doesn't mean to be an economic contributor to your family farm anymore. Exactly. It's something else now. And this is the Zell's work, again, in part. And so none of my claims are meant to be universal across time or space. They're examples from the United States today.
SPEAKER_02:But the taboo helps explain differences in some of those cases, or it might. So I think that there were early cases where compensating fathers for lost children for for children who had been enticed away right um in a way that we wouldn't do today where we wouldn't yeah compensable kinds of injuries right because
SPEAKER_05:so it's your sense we that courts would not rule in a similar way today i mean or is it explicit they've just said no we don't recognize that for it anymore
SPEAKER_03:uh well the the you know the parents don't have the same rights to the economic fruits of the child's labor, in part because the child's not allowed to work. Even if they do, I assume state law is different. And I looked at California law at one point, but this was decades ago, about you have to put it in trust for the child or something like that.
SPEAKER_05:Right, right. The reasoning in the case was based purely off of their ability to bring income from outside.
SPEAKER_03:That's my guess. I imagine that Greg is referencing cases from an era where a child's labor was clearly the property of not the parents, but the father. And once we don't have that anymore, then putting a price tag on kids or child labor is more strange, more taboo.
SPEAKER_02:Even though you can make them work if they're your children. You still have to send them to school, but there's nothing that stops you from putting them to work on your farm. You just can't rent them out.
SPEAKER_05:Speaking of the Richard Posner of family law, Greg, you're going to get hate mail now. Talking about renting children.
SPEAKER_02:That's right. And this is, this is sort of, you know, so I pay someone to take my kids. I don't know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_03:You know, so sometimes, yes. So sometimes, you know, you, you, you, you, we, we, we, we joked, uh, the camp counselor for our kids now came up with, with them and was like, are these your kids? And we were like, you know, uh, uh, Sometimes a weekend off would be nice. But yeah, so I think that some of the themes in this paper, you know, one of the things I'm trying to do is not come across as Richard Posner, right? I'm trying to be sensitive to the idea that we can, or I'm trying to maybe thread a needle. I'm trying to say we can, you know, do the relational work necessary to more openly conduct these trade-offs. Or at least we should try to be more open about those trade-offs. And we can do so without saying that children are simply monetized. Because here, again, I'm just talking about adult welfare and child welfare. And I think we can even say children's lives are more valuable. And we can do that based off of life years, which I don't think we wanna do for a host of reasons that I discuss in a different paper. And mostly because of the impacts for the elderly who only have maybe five life years left, maybe their lives should be more valuable than just the years. But to have a kind of a lumpy moral category of children and adults I think actually tracks a lot of our lay intuitions. And again, there's gray areas, exactly where one transitions. Is it 18? Is it 21, as it was for many hundreds of years? Or is it really 16 when you learned to drive or something like that? But lumpy categories, I think, do reflect how we think about children and adults. And I think we can make some trade-offs and still say children are more valuable, but their interests can't have lexical priority over adult interests, at least not in discourse, because we would never follow that rule in real life. But if we think about intact families and what intact families do, they make compromises all the time, right? Like, oh, and it's not just about... maximizing the best interests of my children. It's also about my projects and my partner's projects and keeping contact with grandparents. And none of that is, it's not all collapsible into maximizing the interests of children. Otherwise, I would never be able to get myself a new camera or a new whatever, or we'd all be wearing burlap sacks to make sure that our kids could wear Gucci or whatever. Obviously, I was assuming a very strange definition of best interests where price of clothing is the proper definition. But since we do make these trade-offs, I would like more alignment, I'll just say, between our actions and our discourse, or at least more open.
SPEAKER_05:This has been great, you guys. Thanks, both of you, for doing it.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, thank you. This was super interesting and actually very helpful for a project at a very early stage. It's
SPEAKER_05:more fun to do these for a paper that is still in progress, I think, because I feel like it's a more, it's more of a discussion, right? Instead of just saying, oh, what you said on page four, I don't like, like, you know, what are you supposed to do once you've already said it? I find it more enjoyable, this type of discussion. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I do too.
SPEAKER_05:Well, I'll let you guys go.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you so much. And thank you again for inviting me, Kim. Thank you for agreeing to do it.
SPEAKER_05:And thanks Greg for helping do this. I needed, I needed somebody who knew something about family law to, you know, help me with this.
SPEAKER_03:I was happy to bring fields together.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
