Scott Altman has taught family law, community property, and property at USC Gould for nearly four decades. His research centers on the legal and moral dimensions of intimate relationships and the broader philosophical questions those cases raise. Altman recently published in Ethics, widely regarded as the most prestigious moral philosophy journal in the world, and his work was selected for extended discussion in the PEA Soup Blog. He also received the 2022 Best Essay Prize from the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
Please introduce yourself.
I’m Scott Altman, and I’ve been teaching family law, community property, and property at USC for almost 40 years. I love teaching these subjects. Students feel an immediate connection to the issues in family law and community property, and their reactions are often personal and intense.
Property is admittedly less thrilling (my students might choose a blunter adjective), but I treasure the chance to help first‑year students realize they can master difficult material. Watching that confidence develop never gets old.
What is your interpretation of law and philosophy? How would you describe it to someone who didn’t know about this specific niche?
Legal philosophy traditionally asks a few basic questions: What is law, why does it matter, and what justifies the state’s power to control and punish? It also examines whether and when people have duties to obey the law.
More recently, scholars have turned to the moral foundations of specific fields such as contracts, torts, and family law, and to the ethics of particular legal disputes, from the death penalty to safe housing to same‑sex marriage. Together, these questions help us understand not just what the law is, but what it ought to be.
Can you briefly describe the focus of your research? What gap in existing knowledge do you hope to fill or add to with your scholarship? Tell us a bit about your motivation for your specialty area.
I write about the legal and moral questions that arise in intimate relationships. Much of my work focuses on family law — child support, relocation after divorce, conflicts between religious education and children’s secular needs, threats to litigate custody for financial leverage, and even whether parenting should require a license.
Those questions led me to related moral puzzles outside the family. Once you start thinking about power, vulnerability, and responsibility in close relationships, you see the parallel issues in blackmail, boycotts, religiously motivated discrimination, firing workers for their political views, and sexual‑harassment nondisclosure agreements.
I’m drawn to these topics because they spark intense debates that divide us into camps: parents’ rights vs. children’s rights, religious freedom vs. civil rights, free speech vs. free association. These debates often generate more heat than light. They make it hard to see the partial truth on both sides or to imagine sensible compromises. I think philosophy can help us slow down, see the moral seriousness of competing claims, and maybe reduce some of the polarization.
One example is my article about the religious baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same‑sex couple. He argued that baking the cake would make him complicit in conduct he viewed as sinful. I noted that many of his critics were also deeply concerned about complicity. They invest in socially responsible funds, boycott Chick‑fil‑A, or avoid hiring people whose politics they find objectionable. And the baker’s own complaint echoed the couple’s: he felt excluded from commercial life because of his beliefs, just as they felt excluded because of who they loved. Seeing these symmetries doesn’t require agreement, but it can help each side recognize something of itself in the other.
Working through cases like this has let me explore broader questions about coercion, exploitation, complicity, respect, autonomy, and the nature of intimacy — the moral architecture that shapes both families and communities.
Please tell us how you arrived at Gould.
I came to USC in 1988, just one year after graduating from law school. I was already focused on dueling moral perspectives in family law. When I was a student, the Baby M case was decided — it was the first court decision on whether a surrogate mother could change her mind and keep the child. The story of a woman who promised to give up a child for pay reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin. In that fable, the mother was seen as a sympathetic victim, even as she used trickery to avoid her commitment. In Baby M, some people saw the breaching mother as the villain. My first publication, titled “Rumpelstiltskin Revisited,” explored the moral claims on each side. Writing that made me sure I had found the right career path.
What do you hope your students take away from your courses? What would success as a professor look like for you?
My teaching tries to prioritize students’ professional needs to learn legal rules and master legal arguments. The hard moral questions at the center of my research enhance class discussions, but necessarily take a back seat. Success as a professor means inspiring students to learn, helping them master complex material, and preparing them for the bar and practice.
I hope they take away from my classes more than just these necessary skills — that they also see the complexity of hard moral questions, the lure of positions they think are wrong, and the humanity of the people on opposing sides. These lessons aren’t tested on the bar. But I hope absorbing them will make my students better lawyers and happier people.
Previous Article
