Yukiko Kobayashi Lui (SJD 2025)
Area of Study: Family law and welfare law
Yukiko Kobayashi Lui grew up in Hong Kong and earned her law degree at the University of Cambridge, but when she decided to pursue an SJD, she chose to study at the U of T Faculty of Law in order to work with Professor Brenda Cossman.
“Her scholarship has been formative for me. My doctoral research follows on from her work, so I was extremely excited about the opportunity to work with her,” says Kobayashi Lui, who holds a Centre for Ethics Doctoral Fellowship, a Mary H. Beatty Fellowship and a Graduate Fellowship in Women’s Rights. “It has been wonderful to have her as my supervisor because she deeply understands the research I want to do and she has been so supportive of me as a junior scholar.”
Kobayashi Lui is exploring how legal relationship status affects access to private and public redistribution, from spousal support to government social assistance such as disability and unemployment supplements.
“Money is a neglected aspect of family law,” Kobayashi Lui says. “For example, relationship status affects entitlement to social assistance and therefore how much money you have in your pocket. A large swath of people lives outside the norm of what we imagine when we say ‘family’—romantic, conjugal couples. I want to see how we can make it easier for them to exercise their choices about their family lives by reducing the impact relationship status has on these supports.”
She anticipates that alternative living arrangements will be more common as the population ages and unrelated individuals choose to live together interdependently and care for each other. However, because they are not romantic or sexual couples, there may be fewer entitlements for government supports.
“We give benefits to married couples and cohabitants,” she notes. “Why can’t we give them to disabled or elderly friends living together? Because the law is so focused on conjugal relationships, those sorts of relationships are not addressed, which leads to material disadvantage for these already marginalized people.”
Eventually, Kobayashi Lui hopes to become a law professor and to write about these legal issues for the lay population.