Changes in family structures, demographics, social attitudes and economic policies over the last 60 years have had a large impact on family lives and correspondingly on family law. The Second Edition of this Handbook draws upon recent developments to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date global perspective on the policy challenges facing family law and policy round the world. The chapters apply legal, sociological, demographic and social work research to explore the most significant issues that have been commanding the attention of family law policymakers in recent years. Featuring contributions from renowned global experts, the book draws on multiple jurisdictions and offers comparative analysis across a range of countries. The book addresses a range of issues, including the role of the state in supporting families and protecting the vulnerable, children's rights and parental authority, sexual orientation, same-sex unions and gender in family law, and the status of marriage and other forms of adult relationships. It also focuses on divorce and separation and their consequences, the relationship between civil law and the law of minority groups, refugees and migrants and the movement of family members between jurisdictions along with assisted conception, surrogacy and adoption. This advanced-level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of family law and social policy as well as policymakers in the field.

Originally published in 1968, we were witnessing a new - and welcome - emphasis on Comparative Law, both in the Universities and even the practising profession, together with a quickened interest in the law of family relations. This volume provided a wealth of information for anyone wishing to study these relations in a widely comparative context. The chapters cover not only the basic law of marriage and divorce in a number of developing countries both in Asia and Africa, but also discuss in considerable detail the ways in which matrimonial property is regulated under different systems. This was a highly topical subject at the time, when our own law of matrimonial property was under criticism and active reconsideration. The book also treats such subjects as the eclipse of the patriarchal family in contemporary Islamic law, religious law and the modern family in Israel, the juristic basis and context of Parsi family law, and contemporary family law in Southern Africa.

This book identifies the definition of a child within the law, the rights of children, and discusses the extent to which primarily English law gives adequate recognition to and protection of these rights. To what extent does English law gives adequate recognition to and protection of the rights of children? Historically the idea of and protection of rights has focused on parental rights rather than the rights of the child. The rights of children have remained far less recognised and certain until recently. Using case studies from the United Kingdom and beyond, this book takes a thematic approach to children's rights and considers topics including: underlying concepts such as the welfare of the child and safeguarding, the right to education and to medical treatment, the right to freedom from abuse and/or sexual and commercial exploitation, including contemporary challenges from forced marriage, FGM, modern slavery and trafficking, the role of the State in relation to children in need of care and protection, children's rights in the criminal justice system, the right to contract and employment. In addition, the book provides an introduction to key aspects of domestic and international law, including the Children Act 1989, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998. The book will be of great interest to law and social science students in the areas of Child Development and Protection, Human Rights Law, Family Law, Child Law, and Child Studies, as well as to social workers, police officers, magistrates, probation officers and other related professions.

The Concise Seventh Edition of Cases and Materials on Family Law offers students an accessible introduction to the field that follows its traditional and emerging forms. It delivers a streamlined presentation of cases and materials in a way designed to focus on family law cases and rules across the major highways of the field, rounded out by judiciously edited additional materials for depth and perspective. The Concise Seventh Edition updates and builds on earlier editions' well-known treatment of family law's many equality themes. The new edition features meaningful engagements at family law's intersection with different axes of inequality, including race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and class. The Concise Seventh Edition also features a new introductory chapter and returns to the more comprehensive treatment of children in family law, especially around child welfare. CasebookPlus Hardbound - New, hardbound print book includes lifetime digital access to an eBook, with the ability to highlight and take notes, and 12-month access to a digital Learning Library that includes self-assessment quizzes tied to this book, leading study aids, an outline starter, and Gilbert Law Dictionary.

* Provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of theory, research, policy, and practice of juvenile risk and needs assessment (JRNA) * Informs future methodology, policy, and practice that will facilitate effective and fair case decisions * Covers JRNA as a set of interrelated pieces for assessing and making decisions about juveniles

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. In principle, couples getting married in England and Wales can choose to do so in a way that reflects their beliefs. In practice, the possibility of doing so varies considerably depending on the religious or non-religious beliefs they hold. To demonstrate this divergence, this book draws on the accounts of 170 individuals who had, or led, a wedding ceremony outside the legal framework. The authors examine what these ceremonies can tell us about how couples want to marry, and what aspects of the current law preclude them from doing so. This new evidence shows how the current law does not reflect social understandings of what makes a wedding meaningful. As recommended by the Law Commission, reform is urgently needed.

- analyses research that bridges the gap between the criminal justice system and social care. - provides practical policy recommendations to effectively manage young people across the two systems. - will be applicable to those researching and working in Australia, UK, North America and Europe.

This book presents a model for reforming and developing Indigenous related legislation and policy, not only in Australia, but also in other jurisdictions. The model provides guidance about how to seek, listen to and respond to the voices of Indigenous children and young people. The participation of Indigenous children and young people, when carried out in a culturally and age-appropriate way and based on free, prior and informed consent, is an invaluable resource capable of empowering children and young people and informing Indigenous related legislation and policy. This project contributes to the emerging field of robust, ethically sound, participatory research with Indigenous children and young people and proposes ways in which Australian and international legislators and policymakers can implement the principle of children's participation by involving Aboriginal children and young people in the development of law and policy pertaining to their lives. This book provides accounts from Aboriginal children and young people detailing their views on how they can be involved in law and policy development in the future. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, legislators, and students in the fields of human rights law, children's rights, participation rights, Indigenous peoples' law, and family, child and social welfare law.

This book examines the prevailing legal discourse surrounding domestic violence law in India. It investigates the myths, patriarchal stereotypes, and misconceptions that undermine the process of justice and dilute legal provisions to the detriment of survivors. The volume: Develops arguments based on legal case studies and draws extensively on knowledge from various fields of study, as well as the experience of women survivors. Examines fallacies within the legal framework through a study of strategic lawsuits against public participation suits within the Indian context. Proposes measures for a fair and more gender inclusive legal system that focuses on facilitating access to justice. Suggests that emphasis be laid on establishing the rule of law and eliminating the culture of violence. A key text on gender and law in India, this book will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of socio-legal studies, law, gender, human rights, women's studies, social science, political science, and feminist jurisprudence in South Asia. It will also be of interest to NGOs, activists, and lawyers.

Examines how protective and risk factors associated with two distinct types of youth violence - exposure to and engagement in violence - are nested within four layers of the ecological framework Offers a bridge between the literature on exposure to violence and involvement in violence among youth Places prior and contemporary research within an ecological framework that addresses multiple factors related to protective and risk factors associated with exposure to and engagement in violence Links theory to evidence-based practice by demonstrating how applied and academic knowledge can be used in tandem to encourage translational science to improve neighborhoods and youth experiences within their communities, families, and with their peers while acknowledging the importance of individual characteristics

Based on field studies and in-depth interviews across rural and urban China, this book presents a socio-legal analysis of non-state organised care for some of China's most vulnerable children. The first full-length book to examine non-state organised care of modern China's 'lonely children' (gu'er), this book describes the context in which abandonment occurs and the care provided to children unlikely to be adopted because of their disability. It also explores the various faith groups and humanitarian workers providing this care in private orphanages and foster homes in response to perceived deficiencies in the state orphanage system, in the context of a broader societal shift from 'welfare statism' to 'welfare pluralism'. Formal law and policy has not always kept pace with this shift. This study demonstrates that, in practice, state regulation of these unauthorised care providers has mostly centred on local-level negotiations, hidden rules, and discretion, with mixed outcomes for children. However there has also been a recent shift towards tighter state control and clearer laws, policies, and standards. This timely research sheds light on the life paths and stories of today's 'lonely children' and the changing terrain of civil society, humanitarianism, policy-making, and state power in modern China. As such, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Asian and Chinese studies, law and society, NGOs, and comparative social and child welfare.

CasebookPlus Hardbound - New, hardbound print book includes lifetime digital access to an eBook, with the ability to highlight and take notes, and 12-month access to a digital Learning Library that includes self-assessment quizzes tied to this book, leading study aids, an outline starter, and Gilbert Law Dictionary.

Supriya Singh tells the stories of 12 Anglo-Celtic and Indian women in Australia who survived economic abuse. She describes the lived experience of coercive control underlying economic abuse across cultures. Each story shows how the woman was trapped and lost her freedom because her husband denied her money, appropriated her assets and sabotaged her ability to be in paid work. These stories are about silence, shame and embarrassment that this could happen despite professional and graduate education. Some of the women were the main earners in their household. Women spoke of being afraid, of trying to leave, of losing their sense of self. Many suffered physical and mental ill-health, not knowing what would trigger the violence. Some attempted suicide. None of the women fully realised they were suffering family violence through economic abuse, whilst it was happening to them. The stories of Anglo-Celtic and Indian women show economic abuse is not associated with a specific system of money management and control. It is when the morality of money is betrayed that control becomes coercive. Money as a medium of care then becomes a medium of abuse. The women's stories demonstrate the importance of talking about money and relationships with future partners, across life stages and with their sons and daughters. The women saw this as an essential step for preventing and lessening economic abuse. A vital read for scholars of domestic abuse and family violence that will also be valuable for sociologists of money.

Globalisation, and the vast migrations of capital and labour that have accompanied it in recent decades, has transformed family law in once unimaginable ways. Families have been torn apart and new families have been created. Borders have become more porous, allowing adoptees and mail order brides to join new families and women fleeing domestic violence to escape from old ones. People of different nationalities marry, have children, and divorce, not necessarily in that order. They file suits in their respective home states or third states, demanding support, custody, and property. Otherwise law-abiding parents risk jail in desperate efforts to abduct their own children from foreign ex-spouses. The aim of this Handbook is to provide scholars, postgraduate students, judges, and practioners with a broad but authoritative review of current research in the area of International Family Law. The contributors reflect on a range of jurisdictions and legal traditions and their approaches vary. Each chapter has a distinct subject matter and was written by an author who was invited because of his or her expertise on that subject. This volume provides a valuable contribution to emerging understandings of the subject.

This book discusses a number of important themes in comparative law: legal metaphors and methodology, the movements of legal ideas and institutions and the mixity they produce, and marriage, an area of law in which culture - or clashes of legal and public cultures - may be particularly evident. In a mix of methodological and empirical investigations divided by these themes, the work offers expanded analyses and a unique cross-section of materials that is on the cutting edge of comparative law scholarship. It presents an innovative approach to legal pluralism, the study of mixed jurisdictions, and language and the law, with the use of metaphors not as an illustration but as a core element of comparative methodology.

Published in 1996, this book presents an innovative method for studying the work of professionals with clients that was applied to an evaluation study of legislation and of lawyers working with clients seeking a divorce. With the simulated client methods, the researcher plays the role of simulated or hypothetical clients with predetermined characteristics who are consulting a lawyer, the research subject. The research is carried out in the natural setting of the lawyer's office and the lawyer conducts business as usual. The method overcomes problems of access due to client confidentiality that are commonly found in research of professional groups. It is a qualitative but focused method for evaluation research which has strengths for making comparisons across professional practice. The book will be useful to those conducting research on professionals and other elite groups working with clients as well as those interested in the socio-legal study of legal professionals. This book was originally published as part of the Cardiff Papers in Qualitative Research series edited by Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont and Amanda Coffey. The series publishes original sociological research that reflects the tradition of qualitative and ethnographic inquiry developed at Cardiff. The series includes monographs reporting on empirical research, edited collections focussing on particular themes, and texts discussing methodological developments and issues.

It is often asserted that 'A family that prays together, stays together'. But what if a child no longer wishes to pray? This book analyses the law in relation to situations where parents force their children to manifest the parental religion. From thorough examination of international law it argues that, unlike what is generally believed, the human rights regime does not grant parents a right to impose manifestations of their religion on their children. Instead, the author proposes to regard coerced manifestations as a limitation on children's right to freedom of manifestation, based on national laws that give parents rights at the domestic level under principles such as parental responsibility. The book focuses on two aspects of States' positive obligations in this regard. First, the obligation to provide a regulatory framework that can protect children's right to freedom of manifestation, and restricts limitations to those that are proportionate or 'necessary in a democratic society'. Second, to provide access to remedies, which it is argued should consist of access to a family-friendly infrastructure for dispute resolution available to parents and children in conflict over religious manifestation. Both depend heavily on the way States balance power between parents and children at the national level. The book includes three case studies and social research of jurisdictions that offer different perspectives under the principles of parental authority (France), parental responsibility (England) and parental rights (Hong Kong).

This book critically examines domestic violence law in India. It focuses on women's experiences and perspectives as victims and litigants, with regard to accessibility to law and justice. It also reflects on the manner in which the legal process reproduces gender hierarchies. This volume: Analyzes the legal framework from a gender perspective to pinpoint the inherent stereotypes, prejudices and discriminatory practices that come into play while interpreting the law; Includes in-depth interviews and case studies, and explores critical themes such as marriage, rights, family, violence, property and the state; Presents alternatives beyond the domain of law, such as qualitative medical care and legal aid facilities, shelter homes, short-stay homes, childcare facilities, and economic and social security provisions to survivors and their children. Drawing on extensive testimonies and ethnographic studies situated in a theoretical framework of law, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of law, gender, human rights, women's studies, sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

This book is an anthropologist's field study of the new court set up in Singapore to deal with matrimonial suits (chiefly divorce) among Muslims. The study is based on careful observation of the court in action, and analyses in detail the relationship between the reformist aims of the new law and the values and expectations of litigants. The book takes its departure from the argument developed in Dr Djamour's earlier work, Malay Kinship and Mamage in Singapore (Athlone Press, 1959; paperback edition 1965), and discusses the effect of recent attempts to promote the stability of Muslim marriage. Social scientists, lawyers, students of Islam, and those interested in Malayan problems will find in this book the same qualities that distinguished Dr Djamour's previous study -- lively and sympathetic descriptive powers joined to an ability for clear factual analysis.

The growth of data-collecting goods and services, such as ehealth and mhealth apps, smart watches, mobile fitness and dieting apps, electronic skin and ingestible tech, combined with recent technological developments such as increased capacity of data storage, artificial intelligence and smart algorithms, has spawned a big data revolution that has reshaped how we understand and approach health data. Recently the COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded a variety of data privacy issues. The collection, storage, sharing and analysis of health- related data raises major legal and ethical questions relating to privacy, data protection, profiling, discrimination, surveillance, personal autonomy and dignity. This book examines health privacy questions in light of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the general data privacy legal framework of the European Union (EU). The GDPR is a complex and evolving body of law that aims to deal with several technological and societal health data privacy problems, while safeguarding public health interests and addressing its internal gaps and uncertainties. The book answers a diverse range of questions including: What role can the GDPR play in regulating health surveillance and big (health) data analytics? Can it catch up with internet-age developments? Are the solutions to the challenges posed by big health data to be found in the law? Does the GDPR provide adequate tools and mechanisms to ensure public health objectives and the effective protection of privacy? How does the GDPR deal with data that concern children's health and academic research? By analysing a number of diverse questions concerning big health data under the GDPR from various perspectives, this book will appeal to those interested in privacy, data protection, big data, health sciences, information technology, the GDPR, EU and human rights law.

Concern is growing about children's rights and the curtailment of those rights through the excesses of neoliberal governance. This book discusses children's spatial and citizenship rights, and the ways young people and their families push against diminished rights. Armed initially with theoretical concerns about the construction of children through the political status quo and the ways youth rights are spatially segregated, the book begins with a disarmingly simple supposition: Young people have the right to make and remake their spaces and, as a consequence, themselves. This book de-centers monadic ideas of children in favor of a post-humanist perspective, which embraces the radical relationality of children as more-than-children/more-than-human. Its empirical focus begins with the struggles of Slovenian Izbrisani ('erased') youth from 1992 to the present day and reaches out to child rights and youth activists elsewhere in the world with examples from South America, Eastern Europe and the USA. The author argues that universal child rights have not worked and pushes for a more radical, sustainable ethics, which dares to admit that children's humanity is something more than we, as adults, can imagine. Chapters in this groundbreaking contribution will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the social sciences, humanities and public policy.

Dealing with the interface between the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) movement and the phenomenon of domestic violence against women, this book examines the phenomenon of divorce disputes involving violence through the prism of 'alternative justice' and the dispute resolution mechanisms offered by the ADR movement. This book is the first academic treatise presenting the theoretical underpinnings of the correlation between the ADR movement and divorce disputes involving violence, and the potential contribution of this movement to the treatment of disputes of this nature. Through mapping the main values of the ADR movement, the book proposes a theoretical-analytical basis for understanding the inability of the legal system to deal with disputes of this nature, alongside a real alternative, in the form of the ADR mechanisms.

This book considers how a phenomenon as complex as coercive control can be criminalised. The recognition and ensuing criminalisation of coercive control in the UK and Ireland has been the focus of considerable international attention. It has generated complex questions about the "best" way to criminalise domestic abuse. This work reviews recent domestic abuse criminal law reform in the UK and Ireland. In particular, it defines coercive control and explains why using traditional criminal law approaches to prosecute it does not work. Laws passed in England and Wales versus Scotland represent two different approaches to translating coercive control into a criminal offence. This volume explains how and why the jurisdictions have taken different approaches and examines the advantages and disadvantages of each. As jurisdictions around the world review what steps need to be taken to improve national criminal justice responses to domestic abuse, the question of what works, and why, at the intersection of domestic abuse and the criminal law has never been more important. As such, the book will be a vital resource for lawyers, policy-makers and activists with an interest in domestic abuse law reform.

Parents Killing Children: Crossing the Invisible Line explores hidden forms of violence within the family. This socio-legal study addresses the interactions between the family and the state, focusing on six parent perpetrators and the ways in which child endangerment is concealed within society. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, mythology and a modelling of case study data, this book puts forward a unique conceptualisation of representation and risk, both on familial and state levels. The failure of the state to intervene and neutralise volatile perpetrators also sheds light on the socio-legal status of children - society's most vulnerable - and the book concludes by discussing means by which the underlying social conditions and maladies symptomatic of child abuse and killing should be addressed.

Maternity Discrimination is an ever increasingly important area of the law around the world, affecting both women and men as they juggle parenthood and the workplace. Pregnant Pause provides readers with a better understanding of the issue of maternity discrimination and inequality by looking at the primary role of legislation, and its impact on the court process at both national and international levels for those suffering maternity discrimination. It also discusses the two most important trade agreements of our day - namely the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union Treaty - in a historical and compelling analysis of maternity discrimination and employment. By providing a detailed examination of the relationship between maternity issues in the workplace and the law, the book will be an important read for all those concerned with equality.