Chetana Sabnis

How do states decide which intimate relationships to recognize as family? Existing political science scholarship attributes state recognition to social norms or to policies concerning women’s disproportionate childcare burdens. Instead, I develop the theory of the Intimacy Contract, which argues that states enforce an ideological vision of family by recognizing and extending legal entitlements to relationships that conform to this vision while denying them to others. I illustrate this theory by analyzing more than 6,000 appellate court cases involving relationships that lack default legal recognition and whose social legitimacy is contested: women in extramarital relationships seeking spousal entitlements in India, and non-biological caregivers seeking parental rights in the U.S. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, I show that courts deliberately recognize relationships when they resemble the state’s ideal family. These findings demonstrate that states do not merely reflect social norms but actively constitute the family, expanding political science’s understanding of state power.

How do states decide which intimate relationships are "family"? In India, extramarital relationships lack default legal standing. Yet appellate courts sometimes extend spousal entitlements to women in these relationships. To understand this puzzle, I develop the Intimacy Contract: a conceptual framework illuminating how states reward relationships resembling their ideological vision of marriage. This framework addresses a blind spot in social science scholarship that neglects how states extend and deny entitlements to relationships. Using large language models (LLMs) with human oversight, I analyze 2,721 Indian appellate court cases from 2000 to 2024. I find that when relationships resemble the state’s ideal marriage—a conjugal life, a traditional gender dynamic, and shared religiosity—courts are 56 percent more likely to recognize them, and when these features are absent, the likelihood drops to 22 percent. This stark difference reflects a broader ideological logic through which states regulate intimate life.

This paper examines when U.S. state appellate courts recognize third-party claimants—individuals who lack default legal recognition as parents—seeking rights over a child. Using a dataset of 4,816 U.S. state court cases (2000-2025), I argue that recognition depends on the claimant’s alignment with the ideal of the intensive caregiver. Claimants who demonstrate sustained, resource-intensive caregiving are 36 percentage points more likely to be recognized in comparison to a baseline recognition of only 6 percentage points. This standard operates regardless of kinship and gender and holds consistently across states in the country. The force of this ideal is most starkly revealed when third-party claimants oppose biological parents: courts are more likely to recognize third-party claimants when biological parents fall short of intensive caregiving, illustrating that the ideal is as applicable to the latter as it is to the former.

This article examines the use of large language models (LLMs) to collect and classify information in court data. While computational approaches have traditionally relied on pattern matching techniques, these methods struggle to obtain detailed information from court data. Drawing on projects involving more than 2,700 Indian court cases and 4,800 U.S. state cases, I argue that LLMs offer three advantages over traditional approaches: they can identify concepts from natural language descriptions, synthesize information across complex documents, and lower the technical barriers to large-scale text analysis. I develop a framework to use LLMs effectively so that the model draws on relevant information and produces reliable outputs. In a hand-coding validation of 600 cases, the framework produced classifications that mostly aligned with human coding. The article concludes by discussing the ethical considerations, including environmental costs, research labor implications, and risks of concentrating power within a small number of firms.