Very little is known about the life of the Attic orator Isaeus, who was active during the first half of the fourth century BCE, and many of his speeches have been lost to posterity. Published in 1904, these surviving speeches, presented in the original Greek with extensive commentary by the classical scholar William Wyse (1860 1929), are mostly concerned with the convoluted intrigue of inheritance disputes. Wyse regarded Isaeus as 'an unscrupulous falsifier of law and fact in the service of clients whose claims to the estates they contested were, without exception, fraudulent'. While modern scholars may not fully share this view, Wyse's monumental and learned edition is still a standard work in the study of ancient family law. In addition to a critical introduction, the texts of the speeches, and the detailed commentary, this work also includes family trees to aid understanding of the complex cases.

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"A collection that will interest and assist psychologists who work with the wide range of children included in this book. I learned a good deal in my reading of these articles and find it easy to recommend the book to any psychologist whose clinical practice, research, or teaching includes consideration of parent-child relationships, adoption, foster care, child custody, and the significance of family for individual development and social cohesion. . . . Wide-ranging and provocative in its approach to the issue addressed."--"The American Psychological Association"

"The essays encompass the main controversies in the field, placing them in their historical and social contexts. The book will be very useful for courses focusing on this issue, and will serve researchers in welfare history, public policy, legal history, family history, and history of childhood."--"CHOICE"

"A strong argument."--"The law and Politics Book Review"

"Cahn and Hollinger have covered diverse topics - from foster care, to attachment, to racial and ethnic identity in transracial adoption, to legal issues in gay and lesbian adoptions."--"Adoptive Families"

Since the mid-19th century, American law has recognized adoption as a way to create parent-child relationships. As the product of law, rather than blood, adoptive families have become a focal point for debates about the meaning of family, the rights and responsibilities of parents, and the best interests of children.

Families by Law brings together diverse perspectives on contemporary aspects of adoption law and practice. Following a historical overview of adoption in American law and society, the reader presents different responses to concerns about who may place children for adoption, the status of birth parents, who may adopt, and the legal and psychosocial consequences of adoption. The new frontiers of adoption are explored: from transracial and intercountry adoption, adoption by same sex couples, and the adoption of children with special needs, to the movements for opening records and maintaining post-adoption contact between adoptive and birth families. The relationship between adoption and assisted reproductive technologies is discussed, as are feminist, economic, and philosophical perspectives on adoption and procreation. The volume includes statutes and cases, advocacy organization statements, and pieces from legal scholars, social scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists in order to provide a wealth of information about the contemporary dimensions of adoption.

Families by Law provides undergraduates, as well as law, social welfare, and public policy graduate students and others interested in family relationships with a multifaceted context for understanding the complexities of contemporary family life.

Collating the important case law from across public children law, this title provides a comprehensive and in-depth compendium of cases entirely devoted to this field of family law. The Compendium uses easily navigable headings and aims to present the most relevant case(s) on each issue. Case references include neutral citation, reporting citation, location of the relevant principle or guidance within the case, identity of the judge(s) and quotation of the relevant section from the case. The Compendium covers: -Section 20/section 76 Accommodation -Emergencies and Investigations -Threshold Criteria -Interim Care and Supervision Orders -Case Management -International Issues -Evidence -Experts -The Welfare Stage -Care and Supervision Orders -Placement and Adoption Orders -Special Guardianship Orders -Restricting Liberty -Costs -Appeals This book will help the reader to: * Identify the leading authorities on issues across the field of public children law. * Locate principles and guidance within those authorities, including: o identifying where principles are found in those cases; and o providing quotation of those principles. This is an essential text for all public children law practitioners, including barristers, solicitors, members of the judiciary, magistrates, court clerks, legal executives and social work professionals. It would also be a desirable text for academics concerned with public children law.

The institution of marriage is at a crossroads. Across most of the industrialized world, unmarried cohabitation and nonmarital births have skyrocketed while marriage rates are at record lows. These trends mask a new, idealized vision of marriage as a marker of success as well as a growing class divide in childbearing behavior: the children of better educated, wealthier individuals continue to be born into relatively stable marital unions while the children of less educated, poorer individuals are increasingly born and raised in more fragile, nonmarital households. The interdisciplinary approach offered by this edited volume provides tools to inform the debate and to assist policy makers in resolving questions about marriage at a critical juncture. Drawing on the expertise of social scientists and legal scholars, the book will be a key text for anyone who seeks to understand marriage as a social institution and to evaluate proposals for marriage reform.

This book explores the regulation of intimate relationships today. Using historical and contemporary legal-political sources, the author investigates the changing meanings and effects of conjugality.

This 2006 book provides a critical examination of and reflection on the American Law Institute's (ALI) Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution: Analysis and Recommendations ('Principles'), arguably the most sweeping proposal for family law reform attempted in the US over the last quarter century. The volume is a collaborative work of individuals from diverse perspectives and disciplines who explore the fundamental questions about the nature of family, parenthood, and child support. The contributors are all recognized authorities on aspects of family law and provide commentary on the principles examined by the ALI - fault, custody, child support, property division, spousal support and domestic partnerships, utilizing a wide range of analytical tools, including economic theory, constitutional law, social science data and linguistic analysis. This volume also includes the perspectives of US judges and legislators and leading family law scholars in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada and Australia.

This 2006 book provides a fully annotated discussion of the ethical universe surrounding state-mandated and private legal disputes involving the custody and best interest of children. It surveys thousands of court cases, statutes, state bar ethics codes, Attorney General opinions and model codes regarding ethical constraints in family and dependency proceedings. The book not only analyzes ethical rules in terms of the chronology of these proceedings, it also surveys those principles for each of the primary participants - children's counsel, parents' counsel, government attorneys and judges. The book contains chapters on pre-hearing alternative dispute resolution, motion and trial practice, appellate procedures and separation of powers. Finally, the book provides a complete child abuse case file with a comprehensive analysis of the inherent ethical issues.

This book has three key aims: first, to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has changed over the past four centuries, from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth; second, to chart how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time and how different terms influenced policy debates and public perceptions; and, third, to estimate the extent of cohabitation in earlier centuries. To achieve this it draws on hundreds of reported and unreported cases as well as legislation, policy papers and debates in Parliament; thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles; and innovative cohort studies that provide new and more reliable evidence as to the incidence (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. It concludes with a consideration of the relationship between legal regulation and social trends.

Child and family law tells us much about how a society operates, since it touches the lives of everyone living in that society. In this volume, a variety of experts examine child and family law in thirteen countries Australia, Canada, China, India, Israel, Malaysia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Scotland, South Africa and the United States. Each chapter identifies the imperatives and influences that have prevailed to date and offers informed predictions of how it will develop in the years to come. A common chapter structure facilitates comparison of the jurisdictions and, in the introduction, the editor highlights common trends and salient differences. The Future of Child and Family Law therefore provides practitioners, academics and policy-makers with access not just to an overview of child and family law in a range of countries around the world, but also to insights into what has shaped it and options for reform."

This book explores non-consensual adoption - an area of law which has sparked considerable debate amongst academics, practitioners and the judiciary nationally and internationally. The emphasis of this book is on the circumstances in which non-consensual adoption may be regarded as a proportionate measure and when less severe forms of intervention, such as long-term foster care or kinship care, may also meet children's needs while providing protection to children's rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. The book builds on existing literature on adoption law but takes the discussion in new directions, placing an emphasis on the need to closely scrutinise children's and parents' rights at all stages of the adoption process, not simply when parents appeal against the making of an adoption order. A unique feature of this book is its emphasis on routinely incorporating key provisions from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into analysis when determining whether an adoption order is a proportionate measure.

Each year more than 2 million Americans divorced, and most of them use a lawyer. In closed-door conversations between lawyers and their clients strategy is planned, tactics are devised, and the emotional climate of the divorce is established. Do lawyers contribute to the pain and emotional difficulty of divorce by escalating demands and encouraging unreasonable behavior? Do they take advantage of clients at a time of emotional difficulty? Can and should clients trust their lawyers to look out for their welfare and advance their long-term interests?
Austin Sarat and William L.F. Felstiner's new book, based on a pioneering and intensive study of actual conferences between divorce lawyers and their clients, provides an unprecedented behind-the- scenes description of the lawyer-client relationship, and calls into question much of the conventional wisdom about what divorce lawyers actually do. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients suggests that most divorces are marked less by a pattern of aggressive advocacy than by one of inaction and drift. It uncovers reasons why lawyers find divorce practice frustrating and difficult and why clients frequently feel dissatisfied with their lawyers. This new work provides a unique perspective on the dynamics of professionalism. It charts the complex and shifting ways lawyers and clients "negotiate" their relationship as they work out the strategy and tactics of divorce.
Sarat and Felstiner show how both lawyers and clients are able to draw on resources of power to set the agenda of their interaction, while neither one is fully in charge. Rather, power shifts between the two parties; where it is achieved, power is found in the ability to have one's understandings of the social and legal worlds of divorce accepted. Power then works through the creation of shared meanings. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients examines the effort to create such shared meanings about the nature of marriage and why marriages fail, the operation of the legal process, and the best way to bring divorces to closure. It will be fascinating reading for anyone who is going through, or has gone through a divorce, as well as for lawyers, judges, and scholars of law and society.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. Although this case promotes marital freedom and racial equality, there are still significant legal and social barriers to the free formation of intimate relationships. Marriage continues to be the sole measure of commitment, mixed relationships continue to be rare, and same-sex marriage is only legal in 6 out of 50 states. Most discussion of Loving celebrates the symbolic dismantling of marital discrimination. This book, however, takes a more critical approach to ask how Loving has influenced the loving of America. How far have we come since then, and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

This book examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women--rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment--in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. It analyzes why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The authors have compiled original data that allow them to test various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. They also examine the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws. The original data produced for this book make a major contribution to comparisons and analyses of gender violence and law worldwide.

Well-selected and authoritative, Macmillan Core Statutes provide the key materials needed by students in a format that is clear, compact and very easy to use. They are ideal for use in exams. Undergraduate students taking second or third year elective courses in family law as part of their LLB. Postgraduate students and researchers in family law

In 1877, the American Humane Society was formed as the national organization for animal and child protection. Thirty years later, there were 354 anticruelty organizations chartered in the United States, nearly 200 of which were similarly invested in the welfare of both humans and animals. In The Rights of the Defenseless, Susan J. Pearson seeks to understand the institutional, cultural, legal, and political significance of the perceived bond between these two kinds of helpless creatures, and the attempts made to protect them. Unlike many of today's humane organizations, those Pearson follows were delegated police powers to make arrests and bring cases of cruelty to animals and children before local magistrates. Those whom they prosecuted were subject to fines, jail time, and the removal of either animal or child from their possession. Pearson explores the limits of and motivation behind this power and argues that while these reformers claimed nothing more than sympathy with the helpless and a desire to protect their rights, they turned "cruelty" into a social problem, stretched government resources, and expanded the state through private associations. The first book to explore these dual organizations and their storied history, The Rights of the Defenseless will appeal broadly to reform-minded historians and social theorists alike.

American family law makes two key assumptions: first, that the civil state possesses sole authority over marriage and divorce; and second, that the civil law may contain only one regulatory regime for such matters. These assumptions run counter to the multicultural and religiously plural nature of our society. They are also wrong. This book elaborates how those assumptions are descriptively incorrect, and it begins an important conversation about whether more pluralism in family law is normatively desirable. For example, may couples rely upon religious tribunals (Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise) to decide family law disputes? May couples opt into stricter divorce rules, either through premarital contracts or covenant marriages? How should the state respond when couples purport to do these things? Intentionally interdisciplinary and international in scope, this volume contains contributions from fourteen leading scholars. The authors address the provocative question of whether the state must consider sharing its jurisdictional authority with other groups in family law.

How do multireligious and multiethnic societies construct accommodative arrangements that can both facilitate cultural diversity and ensure women's rights? Based on a study of legal adjudication of marriage and divorce across formal and informal arenas in contemporary Mumbai, this book argues that the shared adjudication model in which the state splits its adjudicative authority with religious groups and other societal sources in the regulation of marriage can potentially balance cultural rights and gender equality. In this model the civic and religious sources of legal authority construct, transmit, and communicate heterogeneous notions of the conjugal family, gender relations, and religious membership within the interstices of state and society. In so doing, they fracture the homogenized religious identities grounded in hierarchical gender relations within the conjugal family. The shared adjudication model facilitates diversity as it allows the construction of hybrid religious identities, creates fissures in ossified group boundaries, and provides institutional spaces for ongoing intersocietal dialogue. This pluralized legal sphere, governed by ideologically diverse legal actors, can thus increase gender equality and individual and collective legal mobilization by women effects institutional change.

"Enjoyable and provocative. . . . This collection nicely reveals and sorts through a host of exciting and complex questions about marriage."
--Martha McCluskey, co-editor of "Feminism, Media, and the Law"

"One of the curious features of the early twenty-first century has been the noisy presence of 'marriage' in the public culture. The result has been a public dialogue that often marries bad social science and homophobia, with understandable public anxieties about how children grow up in our world. We deserve better and "Marriage Proposals" provides it. Anita Bernstein's collection draws on the best work by some of the smartest and most thoughtful participants in the recent marriage wars. The authors ask the reader to think hard about how marriage can be justified today. And the result is a book that confronts some of the hardest and deepest questions that face us as a society."--Hendrik Hartog, author of "Man and Wife in America: A History"

"Bringing together insights from law, anthropology, and political theory, the rigorous essays in "Marriage Proposals" strip away easy assumptions about marriage. Readers will emerge from the volume inspired to bring the national conversation on these issues to a deeper and more interesting level."--Suzanne B. Goldberg, author of "Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial"

""Marriage Proposals" brings new insights to the marriage debates by discussing the provocative idea of getting the government out of the business of marriage recognition altogether. Anyone seeking to think clearly about the nature and function of marriage in our society should read this collection."--Brian Bix, Frederick W. Thomas Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Law School

The essays in Marriage Proposals envision a variety of scenarios in which adults would continue to join themselves together seeking permanent companionship and sustenance, linking sexual intimacy to a long commitment, usually caring for each other, and building new families. What would disappear are the legal consequences associated with marriage. No joint income tax return; no immigration privileges like the "fiancA(c)e visa" or the right to bring in a husband or wife; no special statuses for prison visits or hospital decisions; no prerogative to remain silent in court by claiming "confidential marital communications"; no pension entitlements; no marital benefits and detriments regarding criminal or civil liability.

The anthology makes a unique contribution amid the two marriage furors of the day: same-sex marriage and the Bush Administration's "marriage movement" (that marrying is good and more marriages would be better for society). Abolishing the legal category of marriage is the only policy suggestion in current American discourse that speaks to both causes. Activists on both sides of the same-sex marriage fight, along with marriage movement partisans, all seek improvement through law reform. Marriage Proposals gives them a viable reform--abolition of marriage as a legal status--for fighting battles in the courtroom and the streets.

Contributors include Anita Bernstein, Peggy Cooper Davis, Martha Albertson Fineman, Linda C. McClain, Marshall Miller, Lawrence Rosen, Mary Lyndon Shanley, and Dorian Solot.

Defining the Family: Law, Technology, and Reproduction in an Uneasy Age provides a sweeping portrait of the family in American law from the nineteenth century to the present. The family today has come to be defined by individuality and choice. Pre-nuptial agreements, non-marital cohabitation, gay and lesbian marriages have all profoundly altered our ideas about marriage and family. In the last few years, reproductive technology and surrogacy have accelerated this process of change at a breathtaking rate. Once simple questions have taken on a dizzying complexity: Who are the real parents of a child? What are the relationships and responsibilities between a child, the woman who carried it to term, and the egg donor? Between viable sperm and the wife of a dead donor? The courts and the law have been wildly inconsistent and indecisive when grappling with these questions. Should these cases be decided in light of laws governing contracts and property? Or it is more appropriate to act in the best interests of the child, even if that child is unborn, or even unconceived? No longer merely settling disputes among family members, the law is now seeing its own role expand, to the point where it is asked to regulate situations unprecedented in human history. Janet L. Dolgin charts the response of the law to modern reproductive technology both as it transforms our image of the family and is itself transformed by the tide of social forces.

In the last few years European Family Law has undergone considerable changes. Although in the past law reform was slow, since 1969 the impetus for reform has gathered momentum. It is no exaggeration to say that the changes that have occurred in Europe in the last six or seven years have radically altered the very concept of the family in Europe. As a distinguished scholar and former editor of the Family Law volume of the International Encyclopaedia of Com parative Law, Professor Max Rheinstein, has put it: 'These transformations are not fully completed anywhere. They have gone farthest in the countries of highest industrialization and in those of socialist rule. But they have set in wherever industrialization has obtained a foothold. The degree of 'modernization' offamily law may indeed be used as an index of a society's degree of Westernization. 'l Yet, such is the force of traditional patterns of thought that, although we are aware of distinct changes in various legal systems, the underlying and implied assumption is that family law can still move within the traditional framework. This is not surprising for, until comparatively recently at least family law was not thought of as a suitable subject of unification. It was claimed that there is a peculiar and distinct element which derives from the mores and innermost beliefs of each people, from a sort of family Volksgeist that renders impossible the approximation or unification of family law."

The paradigm of family has shifted rapidly and dramatically, from nuclear unit to diverse constellations of intimacy. At the same time, some norms resist change, such as women's continuing role as primary care providers despite their increased uptake of paid work. This tension between transformation and stasis in family arrangements has an impact on economic, emotional, and legal aspects of daily life. House Rules critically explores the intertwining of norms and laws that govern familial relationships. This incisive collection provides tools to analyze those difficulties and, ultimately, to design laws to better respond to ongoing change and avoid entrenching inequalities.

Not the Marrying Kind is a new and comprehensive exploration of the contemporary same-sex marriage debates in several jurisdictions including Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. It departs from much of the existing scholarship on same-sex marriage, which argues either for or against marriage for same-sex couples. Instead, this book begins from a critical analysis of the institution of marriage itself (as well as separate forms of relationship recognition, such as civil partnership, PaCS, domestic partnership) and asks whether and how feminist critiques of marriage might be applied specifically to same-sex marriage. In doing this, the author combines the theories of second wave feminism with insights from contemporary queer theory.

This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.

This collection of essays examine the process and problems of law reform with special reference to the development of family law. The author, Stephen Cretney, who is one of the UK's most distinguished family lawyers, demonstrates the different pressures and influences that affect the development of the law, including the views of judges, the advice of civil servants and the requirements of Parliamentary drafting to an extent which has not previously been appreciated. Topics covered include the involvement of the Church in the 1969 divorce reforms; the struggle for power within the family from 1925 to 1975; approaches to the reform of intestacy; the Children Act of 1948; and the early days of marriage conciliation, amongst others.