Modern family life exhibits a huge variety of new forms. Legal responses to these new forms illustrate the continuing differences between European nations. Nonetheless, the Strasbourg Court has been increasingly active in this area, which provides fertile ground for testing the legitimacy of the Court's interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. When national law refuses to recognize a claimed right, litigants regularly reassert that right before the Strasbourg Court. This has forced it to seek answers to complex domestic controversies, such as the legal recognition for same-sex partners and transgender persons, the ethics of adoption and reproductive rights, the legal regime for cohabitants, or the accommodation of immigrants' aspiration to family reunion. Placing family rights at the core of the judicial legitimacy debate, this book provides a critical analysis of the standards of family rights protection under the Convention. It evaluates the Court's interpretive methodology and discusses the tensions inherent in its supranational quasi-constitutional function. These include the risk of excessive deference to national authorities, at the expense of the effective enforcement of universal rights; the addition of 'new rights'; and inattention to the division of responsibilities between democratic processes within sovereign States and the subsidiary international review.

This third volume in a series on Comparative Succession Law concerns the entitlement of family members to override the provisions of a deceased person's will to obtain money or assets (or more money or assets) from the person's estate. Some countries, notably those in the civil law tradition (such as France or Germany), confer a pre-ordained share of the deceased's estate or of its value on certain members of the deceased's family, and especially on the deceased's children and spouse. Other countries, notably those in the common law tradition (such as England, Canada, or Australia), leave the matter to the discretion of the court, the amount awarded depending primarily on financial need. Whichever form it takes, mandatory family provision is both a protection against disinheritance and also, therefore, a restriction on testamentary freedom. The volume focuses on Europe and on countries influenced by the European experience. In addition to detailed treatment of the law in Austria, England and Wales, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Scotland, and Spain, the book also has chapters on Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, Canada, the countries of Latin America, and the People's Republic of China. Some other countries are covered more briefly, and there is a separate chapter on Islamic law. The book opens with accounts of Roman law and of the law in medieval and early-modern Europe, and it concludes with a comparative assessment of the law as it is today in the countries and legal traditions surveyed in this volume.