About

Maxine Eichner is the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC School of Law, having joined the faculty in 2003. Her scholarly work focuses on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, with particular emphasis on families and inequality, U.S. social welfare law and policy, reproductive rights, feminist theory, and the relationship between family, workplace, and market forces. She is the author of The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored), which won the 2021 PROSE award for best scholarly work on economics, and The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America's Political Ideals. Eichner has written extensively on law and political theory, contributing articles, chapters, and serving as an editor of a family law casebook. She was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper as a commissioner to the Uniform Law Commission in 2022 and is a member of the American Law Institute, where she advised on the Restatement of the Law: Children and the Law project. Her work also includes efforts to help lawyers defend parents against unjust charges of medical child abuse through the UNC School of Law Medical Child Abuse Initiative. Eichner's background includes education at Yale College and Yale Law School, clerkships for Judge Louis Oberdorfer and Judge Betty Fletcher, and practice in civil rights, women's rights, and employment law. She earned a Ph.D. in political theory from UNC and held a fellowship at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Law
• History
• Psychotherapist
• Developmental psychology
• Linguistics
• Business
• Art

Selected publications

• 10 Black Families and the Gaping Absence of the US Family Support System

  New York University Press eBooks · 2026-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Opting Out: Mahmoud, Public Education, and the Future of Parental Rights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pierce, Don't Say Gay Laws, and the Rise of Illiberal Authoritarianism 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• "For Their Benefit": The Lost History of Parental Consent and Minors' Rights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-02-26

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Free-market family policy

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-11-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Inevitable Vagueness of Medical Exceptions to Abortion Bans

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Retrenchment by Division: The New Law and Politics of Parental Rights

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2025-01-01

  article

  For the past century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the importance of parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing and education. Yet suddenly the rhetoric of parental rights is being used to ground a broad range of claims on issues such as what can be taught in public schools, when minors can access gender-affirming care, or who will be punished for helping minors travel for abortion care. Why have parental-rights claims surged so visibly in contemporary law and politics? And are all the new arguments made under the banner of parental rights equally rooted in constitutional precedent? This Article provides a new framework for understanding parental rights, one that differentiates an increasingly salient political practice from a longstanding constitutional law principle. We show that many contemporary efforts claimed to advance parental rights are part of a crucial but understudied social-movement tactic that we label “retrenchment by diversion.” This strategy involves retrenchment in that its goals are to stymie the future progress of equality-focused movements as well as to roll back their existing gains. To sidestep controversy, though, this strategy diverts attention from its rights-reversing motivations by supplying a more politically palatable rationale for its actions— here, the long and valued constitutional tradition of parental rights. While recent parental-rights laws are aimed at minors, we argue the ultimate goal of the retrenchment by diversion strategy in these laws is to threaten equality-focused rights for adults, as well. This Article makes four key contributions to legal literature. First, it uncovers the relationship between the current movement for parental-rights laws and past attempts to roll back rights reforms based on the rhetoric of parental rights. Second, it elucidates retrenchment by diversion as a movement strategy and explains how parental-rights rhetoric effectuates this strategy. In doing so, we identify the ways parental-rights rhetoric effectively obscures the problematic goals that motivate these laws, the harms such laws pose to children and members of disadvantaged groups, and the damage they do to democracy and good government. Third, we offer guidance on how to distinguish legitimate claims of parental rights from uses of parental-rights rhetoric merely to accomplish the strategy of retrenchment by diversion. Fourth and finally, we consider what can be done to counter the new and damaging politics of parental rights.

  Publisher

• Retrenchment by Diversion: the New Politics of Parental Rights

  Michigan Law Review · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  For the past century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the importance of parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing and education. Yet suddenly the rhetoric of parental rights is being used to ground a broad range of claims on issues such as what can be taught in public schools, when minors can access gender-affirming care, or who will be punished for helping minors travel for abortion care. Why have parental-rights claims surged so visibly in contemporary law and politics? And are all the new arguments made under the banner of parental rights equally rooted in constitutional precedent? This Article provides a new framework for understanding parental rights, one that differentiates an increasingly salient political practice from a longstanding constitutional law principle. We show that many contemporary efforts claimed to advance parental rights are part of a crucial but understudied social-movement tactic that we label “retrenchment by diversion.” This strategy involves retrenchment in that its goals are to stymie the future progress of equality-focused movements as well as to roll back their existing gains. To sidestep controversy, though, this strategy diverts attention from its rights-reversing motivations by supplying a more politically palatable rationale for its actions— here, the long and valued constitutional tradition of parental rights. While recent parental-rights laws are aimed at minors, we argue the ultimate goal of the retrenchment by diversion strategy in these laws is to threaten equality-focused rights for adults, as well. This Article makes four key contributions to legal literature. First, it uncovers the relationship between the current movement for parental-rights laws and past attempts to roll back rights reforms based on the rhetoric of parental rights. Second, it elucidates retrenchment by diversion as a movement strategy and explains how parental-rights rhetoric effectuates this strategy. In doing so, we identify the ways parental-rights rhetoric effectively obscures the problematic goals that motivate these laws, the harms such laws pose to children and members of disadvantaged groups, and the damage they do to democracy and good government. Third, we offer guidance on how to distinguish legitimate claims of parental rights from uses of parental-rights rhetoric merely to accomplish the strategy of retrenchment by diversion. Fourth and finally, we consider what can be done to counter the new and damaging politics of parental rights.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Children at Work, Parental Rights—and Rhetoric

  Arkansas law review · 2024-07-01

  articleOpen access

  States are increasingly considering and enacting laws that reduce protections for child laborers, and the number of minors who have been employed in violation of existing child labor laws has been steadily growing. We argue that politicians deploy the rhetoric of parental rights in today’s legislative battles over child labor protections to create political cover for reforms that benefit businesses, not children or their families. Part I demonstrates that appeals to parental rights have a long history in child labor law. Through much of the battle to regulate children’s labor, child-labor opponents insisted that regulations infringed parents’ legitimate rights over the care, custody, and control of their children. Nevertheless, over time, it became clear that children’s wellbeing was best served by a combination of state and federal labor protections that restricted children’s work hours and conditions. Part II turns to the recent attacks on child labor protections in the name of parental rights. This Part considers the political benefits to legislators in framing efforts to roll back labor protections in the name of parental rights, as well as how this rhetoric hides a range of less politically popular forces driving this rollback. It then demonstrates that elimination of existing labor protections for children risks both their current wellbeing and their future prospects. Doing so, we argue, withdraws the state from the critical role it has long played—and should continue to play—in protecting children from market forces. Part III concludes by considering ways to counter the new rhetoric of parental rights and its impact on child labor laws.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Slow to Support Families, Quick to Remove Children: US Exceptionalism in the Role of Government in Children’s Lives

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Clare Huntington

  3 shared

• Paul Michael Kurtz

  2 shared

• Karen Czapanskiy

  2 shared

• Lois A. Weithorn

  University of California Hastings College of the Law

  2 shared

• Brian H. Bix

  University of Minnesota

  2 shared

• Ira Mark Ellman

  Arizona State University

  2 shared

• Lynn Welchman

  1 shared

• Fernando Filgueira

  Universidade Federal de Jataí

  1 shared

Education

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1980

• Other

  University of California, Berkeley School of Law

  1983

• Ph.D., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1988

Awards & honors

• 2021 PROSE award for best scholarly work on economics