From the BESTSELLING Law Express revision series. Law Express Question and Answer: Family Law is designed to ensure you get the most marks for every answer you write by improving your understanding of what examiners are looking for, helping you to focus in on the question being asked and showing you how to make even a strong answer stand out.

Around the world, discriminatory legislation prevents women from accessing their human rights. It can affect almost every aspect of a woman's life, including the right to choose a partner, inherit property, hold a job, and obtain child custody. Often referred to as family law, these laws have contributed to discrimination and to the justification of gender-based violence globally. This book demonstrates how women across the world are contributing to legal reform, helping to shape non-discriminatory policies and to counter current legal and social justifications for gender-based violence. The book takes case studies from Brazil, India, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, and Turkey, using them to demosntrate in each case the varied history of family law and the wide variety of issues impacting women's equality in legislation. Interviews with prominent women's rights activists in three additional countries are also included, giving personal accounts of the successes and failures of past reform efforts. Overall, the book provides a complex global picture of current trends and strategies in the fight for a more egalitarian society. These findings come at a critical moment for change. Across the globe, family law issues are contentious. We are simultaneously witnessing an increased demand for women's equality and the resurgence of fundamentalist forces that impede reform, invoking rules rooted in tradition, culture, and interpretations of religious texts. The outcome of these disputes has enormous ramifications for women's roles in the family and society. This book tackles these complexities head on, and will interest activists, practitioners, students, and scholars working on women's rights and gender-based violence.

Around the world, discriminatory legislation prevents women from accessing their human rights. It can affect almost every aspect of a woman's life, including the right to choose a partner, inherit property, hold a job, and obtain child custody. Often referred to as family law, these laws have contributed to discrimination and to the justification of gender-based violence globally. This book demonstrates how women across the world are contributing to legal reform, helping to shape non-discriminatory policies and to counter current legal and social justifications for gender-based violence. The book takes case studies from Brazil, India, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, and Turkey, using them to demosntrate in each case the varied history of family law and the wide variety of issues impacting women's equality in legislation. Interviews with prominent women's rights activists in three additional countries are also included, giving personal accounts of the successes and failures of past reform efforts. Overall, the book provides a complex global picture of current trends and strategies in the fight for a more egalitarian society. These findings come at a critical moment for change. Across the globe, family law issues are contentious. We are simultaneously witnessing an increased demand for women's equality and the resurgence of fundamentalist forces that impede reform, invoking rules rooted in tradition, culture, and interpretations of religious texts. The outcome of these disputes has enormous ramifications for women's roles in the family and society. This book tackles these complexities head on, and will interest activists, practitioners, students, and scholars working on women's rights and gender-based violence.

How can we end the inter-generational cycle of poverty and dysfunction in the US's urban ghettos? This ground-breaking and controversial book is the first to provide a child-centered perspective on the subject by combining a wealth of social science information with sophisticated normative analysis to support novel reforms-to child protection law and practice, family law, and zoning- that would quickly end that cycle. The rub is that the reforms needed would entail further suffering and loss of liberty for adults in these communities, and liberal advocacy organizations and academics are so adult-centered in their sympathies and thinking that they reflexively oppose any such measures. Liberals have instead promoted one ineffectual parent-focused program after another, in an ideologically-driven quest for the magic pill that can save both adults and children in these communities at the same time. This `insider critique' of liberal child welfare policy reveals a dilemma that liberals have yet to face squarely: there is an ineradicable conflict of interests between many young children and their parents, especially in areas of concentrated poverty, and one must choose sides. It is a must read for legal academics, political scientists, urban policy experts, as well as professionals working in social work, law, education, urban planning, legislative offices, and administrative agencies.

This book explores the intersecting issues relating the phenomenon of ageing to gender and family law. The latter has tended to focus mainly on family life in young and middle age; and, indeed, the issues of childhood and parenting are key in many family law texts. Family life for older members has, then, been largely neglected; addressing this neglect, the current volume explores how the issues which might be important for younger people are not necessarily the same as those for older people. The significance of family, the nature of family life, and the understanding of self in terms of one's relationships, tend to change over the life course. For example, the state may play an increasing role in the lives of older people - as access to services, involvement in work and the community, the ability to live independently, and to form or maintain caring relationships, are all impacted by law and policy. This collection therefore challenges the standard models of family life and family law that have been developed within a child/parent-centred paradigm, and which may require rethinking in the turn to family life in old age. Interdisciplinary in its scope and orientation, this book will appeal not just to academic family lawyers and students interested in issues around family law, ageing, gender, and care; but also to sociologists and ethicists working in these areas.

More than forty years since its initial publication in 1978, the Seventh Edition of Cases and Materials on Family Law gives students an introduction to Family Law that follows the field's traditional and emerging forms in ways that are entirely fresh. Like earlier editions, the Seventh Edition weaves together cases, statutes, model codes, policy, narrative, history, transnational sources, and theory, in highly accessible ways, as it illuminates Family Law's dynamic relationship with the highly variegated social landscape on which it rests. The well-known strengths of earlier editions' treatment of Family Law's many equality themes have been updated and expanded to feature deep engagements at Family Law's intersection with different axes of inequality, including race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and class.

An unflinching expose of how the family, juvenile, and criminal justice systems monetize the communities they purport to serve and trap them in crushing poverty Injustice, Inc. exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations. Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long.

The UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty detailed many children's poor experiences in detention, highlighting the urgent need for reform. Applying a child-centred model of detention that fulfils the rights of the child under the five themes of provision, protection, participation, preparation and partnership, this original book illustrates how reform can happen. Drawing on Ireland's experience of transforming law, policy and practice, and combining theory with real-life experiences, this compelling book demonstrates how children's rights can be implemented in detention. This important case study of reform presents a powerful argument for a progressive, rights-based approach to child detention. Worthy of international application, the book shares practical insights into how theory can be translated into practice.

Collaborative practice is a new method of dispute resolution, used mainly in family law matters. By taking a non-adversarial approach, it challenges the strictly positivist view of the lawyer as 'zealous advocate' for the client. As such, it has received much criticism from the established Bar and legal profession. This book provides a doctrinal and empirical analysis of collaborative practice with a view to assessing its place within the dispute resolution continuum and addressing whether this criticism has been justified. It begins by establishing the theoretical underpinnings of conflict and differing approaches to conflict resolution, the impact of the comprehensive law movement and therapeutic jurisprudence. The origins and development of the collaborative process and the framework it provides for a multidisciplinary approach to conflict resolution is outlined. The book addresses the examination of the process undertaken in the lead up to the enactment of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act in 2010; now regarded as a model of best practice. Finally, through an examination of empirical research undertaken in the US, Canada and in England and Wales, and in presenting the results of the first known empirical research into the process in an Irish family law context, the book concludes with an evidenced based analysis of the process from the perspective of couples who chose to use the collaborative model to resolve the issues surrounding their relationship breakdown, collaborative lawyers and lawyers who do not advocate a non-adversarial approach. As such this book provides a valuable insight into the process which will be of interest to: academics; practising lawyers; members of the judiciary; researchers in the fields of conflict resolution and family law and for students studying alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

After the Act describes the aftermath of the recent removal under LASPO of public funding from legal services in family matters other than in defined cases such as child protection and domestic abuse. Through analysis of the policy context, interviews with key players, observation of services provided by lawyers, students, lay support workers and the advice sector, the authors outline the work being done and the skills being used in a range of settings. The book raises questions not only about access to family justice, but about the role of law in family matters in an increasingly post-legal society. Fragmentation of the market in the new services offering information, initial advice, online or alternative dispute resolution - but rarely ongoing casework - raises questions about where costs fall and how quality can be assured. Many of these services are forms of private ordering, where outcomes are hard to assess. If neither the state nor the individual can afford full legal services where the best interests of any child involved are of paramount importance, and lawyers negotiate to make best use of the resources available, perhaps it is time to consider using lawyers differently, with lay support, to solve problems before they become disputes.

Ireland is the first country in the world to extend civil marriage to same sex couples through a public vote. The marriage equality referendum saw record numbers turn out to register their votes including Irish emigrants who returned from around the world to ensure an impressive majority in favour of this constitutional amendment. The overwhelming positive result marked a clear separation of church and State for possibly the first time in Ireland. The Yes Equality campaign ignited a social revolution across Ireland, witnessed more recently with further referenda decriminalising abortion and introducing a less punitive regime for obtaining a divorce. Utilising published reports, newspaper articles, marriage equality papers and extracts from Dail debates, this book traces the key legislative and social changes surrounding Irish marriage equality, from the establishment of the advocacy group in 2008 to the referendum on the extension of civil marriage rights to same-sex couples in Ireland in 2015. With a foreword by Ivana Bacik, a Senator and Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin, best known for her tireless work defending human rights, this book offers a concise historical record of the momentous referendum on marriage equality. -- .

This book explores the growing interest in the way in which the state polices, and ought to police, families failing in their responsibilities.
Reflects on the increasing social science research and growing legal system involvement in the 'problem' of failing families particularly where children are involved
Considers topics ranging from the state's attempts to promote responsible parenting by training parents and by punishing them and their children for their children's antisocial behaviour through to its enthusiasm for creating frameworks for better substituted parenting (through fostering and adoption)
Evaluates problems from the perspective of both empirical evidence and the practical and ideological ambitions that government policy is attempting to pursue
Brings together commentators from a variety of disciplines who all offer a fresh critique on these matters

After years of research and reflection on the work of the interdisciplinary family justice system Mervyn Murch offers a fresh approach to supporting the thousands of children every year who experience a complex form of bereavement following parental separation and divorce. This stressful family change, combined with the loss of support due to austerity cuts, can damage their education, well-being, mental health and long-term life chances. Murch argues for early preventative intervention which responds to children's worries when they first present them, without waiting until things have gone badly wrong. His radical proposals for reform involve a much more coordinated and joined up approach by schools, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. This book encourages practitioners and academics to look outside their professional silos and to see the world through the eyes of children in crisis to enable services to offer direct support in a manner and at a time when it is most needed.

This title was first published in 2003. The essays in this collection are written by academics and practitioners who look at some of the key aspects of family law. Papers include one from Lord Justice Ward, who gave the first judgement in the Court of Appeal on the case of the conjoined twins from Malta, another from Judge Pearl who has been responsible for training the judiciary on the impact of the Human Rights Act on family law, while Dr C. Ball contributes a paper on aspects of the 1989 Children Act. Parent and child contact across borders is dealt with in a paper by William Duncan, who is Deputy Director General of the Hague Conference. Other topics include medical evidence in child cases, pre-nuptial agreements and the re-establishing of contact after divorce.

High-Conflict Parenting Post-Separation: The Making and Breaking of Family Ties describes an innovative approach for families where children are caught up in their parents' acrimonious relationship - before, during and after formal legal proceedings have been initiated and concluded. This first book in a brand-new series by researchers and clinicians at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families (AFNCCF) outlines a model of therapeutic work which involves children, their parents and the wider family and social network. The aim is to protect children from conflict between their parents and thus enable them to have healthy relationships across both 'sides' of their family network. High-Conflict Parenting Post-Separation is written for professionals who work with high-conflict families - be that psychologists, psychiatrists, child and adult psychotherapists, family therapists, social workers, children's guardians and legal professionals including solicitors and mediators, as well as students and trainees in all these different disciplines. The book should also be of considerable interest for parents who struggle with post-separation issues that involve their children.

Can you hear the child's voice? The Court of Appeal have commented that the family courts are 'still feeling their way forward in order to determine how best to 'hear the voice of a child'. In this new title David Burrows looks at the jurisprudence surrounding this remark, relates it to European and UN Convention rights and looks at the most recent children case law. It concentrates on: Children in court proceedings, particularly in family proceedings Contrasting the way courts hear children's views with the way their evidence is heard Any rights to which a child is entitled (common law; European Convention 1950; UN Conventions; and EU Directives), such as to confidentiality and to take part (or be heard) in proceedings. The meaning and effect of a child's 'understanding' in court proceedings, and the way that term varies according to a child's age and the issue before the court. Legislation and case law covered and analysed includes: Children Act 1989 and applicable Family Procedure Rules 2010 Human Rights Act 1998 and European Convention 1950 Civil Procedure Rules 1998 LASPO Act 2012 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 Re D (A Child) (International Recognition) - child's right to be heard Re W (A Child)- rules for child representation in hearings P v A Local Authority (Fam) - legal aid and statutory damages Re W (Children) (Abuse: Oral Evidence) - child's evidence R (D (a minor)) v Camberwell Green Youth Court - safeguards in criminal law for children Protocol and Good Practice Model Disclosure of information in cases of alleged child abuse and linked criminal and care directions hearings - October 2013 Achieving Best Evidence: Guidance on interviewing children March 2011

Child care law and policy issues generate very strong emotions and some crucial questions concerning the role of the state. For instance, under what circumstances should the state be able to intervene and use the force of the law to protect children? Do children have similar rights to adults? Such questions are matters of controversial debate and, in the light of well publicised child abuse cases, official inquiries and a government review led to the passing of the Children Act in 1989. Perspectives in Child Care Policy presents four different value perspectives on child care policy - laissez-faire; state paternalism; defence of the birth family and children's rights. These perspectives differ in their underlying values, concepts and assumptions concerning children, families, the rights and powers of parents and the role of the state.

This important edited collection is the culmination of research undertaken by the Children's Rights Judgments Project. This initiative involved academic experts revisiting existing case law, drawn from a range of legal sub-disciplines and jurisdictions, and redrafting the judgment from a children's rights perspective. The rewritten judgments shed light on the conceptual and practical challenges of securing children's rights within judicial decision-making and explore how developments in theory and practice can inform and (re-)invigorate the legal protection of children's rights. Collectively, the judgments point to five key factors that support a children's rights-based approach to judgment writing. These include: using children's rights law and principles; drawing on academic insights and evidence; endorsing child friendly procedures; adopting a children's rights focused narrative; and using child-friendly language. Each judgment is accompanied by a commentary explaining the historical and legal context of the original case and the rationale underpinning the revised judgment including the particular children's rights perspective adopted; the extent to which it addresses the children's rights deficiencies evident in the original judgment; and the potential impact the alternative version might have had on law, policy or practice. Presented thematically, with contributions from leading scholars in the field, this innovative collection offers a truly new and unique perspective on children's rights.

Compares today's same-sex marriage movement to the experiences of black people in the mid-nineteenth century. The staggering string of victories by the gay rights movement's campaign for marriage equality raises questions not only about how gay people have been able to successfully deploy marriage to elevate their social and legal reputation, but also what kind of freedom and equality the ability to marry can mobilize. Wedlocked turns to history to compare today's same-sex marriage movement to the experiences of newly emancipated black people in the mid-nineteenth century, when they were able to legally marry for the first time. Maintaining that the transition to greater freedom was both wondrous and perilous for newly emancipated people, Katherine Franke relates stories of former slaves' involvements with marriage and draws lessons that serve as cautionary tales for today's marriage rights movements. While "be careful what you wish for" is a prominent theme, they also teach us how the rights-bearing subject is inevitably shaped by the very rights they bear, often in ways that reinforce racialized gender norms and stereotypes. Franke further illuminates how the racialization of same-sex marriage has redounded to the benefit of the gay rights movement while contributing to the ongoing subordination of people of color and the diminishing reproductive rights of women. Like same-sex couples today, freed African-American men and women experienced a shift in status from outlaws to in-laws, from living outside the law to finding their private lives organized by law and state licensure. Their experiences teach us the potential and the perils of being subject to legal regulation: rights-and specifically the right to marriage-can both burden and set you free.

A call for better child care policies, exploring the reasons why there has been so little headway on a problem that touches so many families. Working mothers are common in the United States. In over half of all two-parent families, both parents work, and women's paychecks on average make up 35 percent of their families' incomes. Most of these families yearn for available and affordable child care-but although most developed countries offer state-funded child care, it remains scarce in the United States. And even in prosperous times, child care is rarely a priority for U.S. policy makers. In In Our Hands: The Struggle for U.S. Child Care Policy, Elizabeth Palley and Corey S. Shdaimah explore the reasons behind the relative paucity of U.S. child care and child care support. They examine the history of child care advocacy and legislation in the United States, from the Child Care Development Act of the 1970s that was vetoed by Nixon through the Obama administration's Child Care Development Block Grant. The book includes data from interviews with 23 prominent child care and early education advocates and researchers who have spent their careers seeking expansion of child care policy and funding and an examination of the legislative debates around key child care bills of the last half-century. Palley and Shdaimah analyze the special interest and niche groups that have formed around existing policy, arguing that such groups limit the possibility for debate around U.S. child care policy.

Exploring the main developments and challenges for the right to family life in the context of European integration, this book examines the right to family life in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the interplay between family life, citizenship, and free movement; it analyzes the combined impact of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights on the concept of the family protected by the law in light of recent case law. Considering the broadening understanding of what constitutes family, the challenges for the right to family life in the context of immigration, and the protection of families and social rights it provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of family life in the European Union.

This volume represents key scholarship on the issue of parental rights and responsibilities, selected from a dense forest of literature. The collection offers an overview of the subject and covers topics such as: underlying rationales of who or what is a parent; legal concepts of 'parent' and their linkage; the legal parent - accommodating complexity; the nature and scope of parental rights; shared parental responsibility; and parental rights and the state.

Originally introduced as a form of social welfare with near-universal eligibility, legal aid in the UK is now framed as a benefit external to the legal system and understood in primarily economic terms. This book is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy. Written by experts in the field, it focuses on the rise in people representing their own legal case and argues that the reforms effectively 'delawyerise' disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process. Arguing for a more holistic concept of the reforms, the book will be of relevance to students, academics, policy-makers, judges, campaigners and social workers, not just in England and Wales, but in other jurisdictions instituting cuts to their legal aid budgets, such as Australia, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.

This volume gathers influential and cutting-edge scholarship on the international and domestic rights attaching to married couples and other adult relationships. Addressing examples from the European Court of Human Rights, UK, USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa, it traces contentious debates about the content of marital rights and responsibilities and whether law should reach beyond marriage, and if so how. Twenty-four essays and a substantial introduction highlight the complexity and contradictions as marital law grapples with gender equality, the aftermath of recognizing gay and lesbian rights, abiding economic inequalities, and 'exotic' issues such as forced marriage and polygamy.

Care is central to life, and yet is all too often undervalued, taken for granted, and hidden from view. This collection of fourteen substantive and highly innovative essays, along with its insightful introduction, seeks to explore the different dimensions of care that shape social, legal and political contexts. It addresses these dimensions in four key ways. First, the contributions expand contemporary theoretical understandings of the value of care, by reflecting upon established conceptual approaches (such as the 'ethics of care') and developing new ways of using and understanding this concept. Second, the chapters draw on a wide range of methods, from doctrinal scholarship through ethnographic, empirical and biographical research methodologies. Third, the book enlarges the usual subjects of care research, by expanding its analysis beyond the more typical focus on familial interconnection to include professional care contexts, care by strangers and care for and about animals. Finally, the collection draws on contributions from academics working in Europe and Australia, across law, anthropology, gender studies, politics, psychology and sociology. By highlighting the points of connection and tension between these diverse international and disciplinary perspectives, this book outlines a new and nuanced approach to care, exploring contemporary understandings of care across law, the social sciences and humanities.