With the accelerating movement of individuals and families across national borders, the intersections of cultural and legal frameworks have become increasingly complex. The Multi-Cultural Family collects essays from around the world on the challenges of legal pluralism, minority religious communities and customary or indigenous law, with attention paid to marriage and divorce, as well as child custody and adoption, family violence and dispute resolution.

Countries around the world are facing pressing needs to enhance financial planning mechanisms for individuals with cognitive impairment. The book provides the first comparative study of the three most common of such mechanisms in Asia and the West, namely guardianship, enduring/lasting powers of attorney, and special needs trusts. It involves not only scholarly overviews of the mechanisms in the jurisdictions studied, but also thorough, structured and critical reviews of their operational experiences. This book will have broad appeal to scholars, students, law and policy makers and practitioners in the fields of mental disability, healthcare and elder law. It is widely recognised in the field that books like this one are needed. This book will also be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in mental health, disability law and elder law.

The law has long been interested in marriage and conjugal cohabitation and in the range of public and private obligations that accrue from intimate living. This collection of classic articles explores that legal interest, while at the same time locating marriage and cohabitation within a range of intimate affiliations. It offers the perspectives of a number of international scholars on questions of how, if at all, our different ways of intimacy ought to be recognised and regulated by law.

This book offers an in-depth and critical analysis of the Istanbul Convention, along with discussions on its impact and implications. The work highlights the place of the Convention in the landscape of international law and policies on violence against women and equality. The authors argue that the Convention with its emphasis on integrated and comprehensive policies has an important role in promoting equality, but they also note the debates on "genderism" that the Convention has triggered in some member states. The book analyses central concepts of the Convention, including violence, gender and due diligence. It takes up major commitments of the parties to the Convention, including support and services to victims, criminal law provisions and protection of migrant women against violence. The book thus makes a major contribution to the development of national laws, policies and practice. It provides a valuable guide for policy-makers, students and academics in international human rights law, criminal and social law, social policy, social work and gender studies.

Jurisdictional Exceptionalisms examines the legal issues associated with a parent's forced removal of their children to reside in another country following relationship dissolution or divorce. Through an analysis of Public and Private International Laws, and Islamic law - historical and as implemented in contemporary Muslim Family Law States - the authors uncover distinct legal lexicons that centre children's interests in premodern Islamic legal doctrines, modern State practice, and multilateral conventions on children. While legal advocates and policy makers pursue global solutions to parental child abduction, this volume identifies fundamental obstacles, including the absence of shared understandings of jurisdiction. By examining the relevant law and practice, the study exposes the polarised politics embedded in the technical legal rules on jurisdiction. Presenting a new, innovative method in comparative legal history, the book examines the beliefs, values, histories, doctrines, institutions and practices of legal systems presumed to be in conflict with one another.

This book considers the rapidly evolving, both legally and socially, nature of image-based abuse, for both minors and adults. Drawing mainly from UK data, legislation and case studies, it presents a thesis that the law is, at best, struggling to keep up with some fundamental issues around image based abuse, such as the sexual nature of the crimes and the long term impact on victims, and at worst, in the case of supporting minors, not fit for purpose. It shows, through empirical and legislative analysis, that the dearth of education around this topic, coupled with cultural norms, creates a victim blaming culture that extends into adulthood. It proposes both legislative developments and need for wider stakeholder engagement to understand and support victims, and the impact the non-consensual sharing of intimate images can have on their long-term mental health and life in general. The book is of interest to scholar of law, criminology, sociology, police and socio-technical studies, and is also to those who practice law, law enforcement or wider social care role in both child and adult safeguarding.

The approximately two million gay and lesbian elders in the United States are an underserved and understudied population. At a time when gay men and lesbians enjoy an unprecedented degree of social acceptance and legal protection, many elders face the daily challenges of aging isolated from family, detached from the larger gay and lesbian community, and ignored by mainstream aging initiatives. Drawing on materials from law, history, and social theory, this book integrates practical proposals for reform with larger issues of sexuality and identity. Beginning with a summary of existing demographic data and offering a historical overview of pre-Stonewall views of homosexuality, author Nancy J. Knauer goes on to address the invisibility of this community. She examines the multiple double binds central to their identity formation, including ageism among gays and lesbians and homophobia among seniors. Further, the book focuses on specific legal concerns such as estate planning, housing, discrimination, and financial insecurity, and how they impact this community uniquely. Integrating theory with practical questions of policy, and advancing a new understanding of the construction of sexuality and identity, this book advocates meaningful new reforms designed to ensure equity and dignity in aging regardless of sexual orientation.

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.

Bringing together some of the world's leading family law scholars, as well as bright and emerging minds in the field of global family law, this book explores the differences and commonalities in the conceptualization and legal treatment of families throughout different legal traditions. Each chapter delves into topics integral to family law jurisprudence and serves as a novel examination into a deep slice of family law. Together, the four parts and sixteen chapters create a melodious and intriguing examination of groundbreaking and cutting-edge areas of law in the realm of the family. The four parts primarily focus upon a major family law topic with the authors examining the laws across jurisdictions, cross-nationally, or in some cases intra-jurisdictionally. It is through this comparative lens that we see how family law concepts are woven into the fabric of overall society around the globe. This book is of interest to family law, international law, sociology, and socio-legal scholars.

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.

How the rise of HIV in India resulted in government protections for gay groups, transgender people, and sex workers This original ethnographic research explores the relationship between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the rights-based struggles of sexual minorities in contemporary India. Sex workers, gay men, and transgender people became visible in the Indian public sphere in the mid-1980s when the rise of HIV/AIDS became a frightening issue. The Indian state started to fold these groups into national HIV/AIDS policies as "high-risk" groups in an attempt to create an effective response to the epidemic. Lakkimsetti argues that over time the crisis of HIV/AIDS effectively transformed the relationship between sexual minorities and the state from one that was focused on juridical exclusion to one of inclusion. The new relationship then enabled affected groups to demand rights and citizenship from the Indian state that had been previously unimaginable. By illuminating such tactics as mobilizing against a colonial era anti-sodomy law, petitioning the courts for the recognition of gender identity, and stalling attempts to criminalize sexual labor, this book uniquely brings together the struggles of sex workers, transgender people, and gay groups previously studied separately. A closely observed look at the machinations behind recent victories for sexual minorities, this book is essential reading across several fields.

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.

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.

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.

As a distinct scholarly contribution to law, feminist legal theory is now well over three decades old. Those three decades have seen consolidation and renewal of its central concerns as well as remarkable growth, dynamism and change. This Companion celebrates the strength of feminist legal thought, which is manifested in this dynamic combination of stability and change, as well as in the diversity of perspectives and methodologies, and the extensive range of subject-matters, which are now included within its ambit. Bringing together contributors from across a range of jurisdictions and legal traditions, the book provides a concise but critical review of existing theory in relation to the core issues or concepts that have animated, and continue to animate, feminism. It provides an authoritative and scholarly review of contemporary feminist legal thought, and seeks to contribute to the ongoing development of some of its new approaches, perspectives, and subject-matters. The Companion is divided into three parts, dealing with 'Theory', 'Concepts' and 'Issues'. The first part addresses theoretical questions which are of significance to law, but which also connect to feminist theory at the broadest and most interdisciplinary level. The second part also draws on general feminist theory, but with a more specific focus on debates about equality and difference, race, culture, religion, and sexuality. The 'Issues' section considers in detail more specific areas of substantive legal controversy.

Reproductive science continues to revolutionise reproduction and propel us further into uncharted territories. The revolution signalled by the birth of Louise Brown after IVF in 1978, prompted governments across Europe and beyond into regulatory action. Forty years on, there are now dramatic and controversial developments in new reproductive technologies. Technologies such as uterus transplantation that may enable unisex gestation and babies gestated by dad; or artificial wombs that will completely divorce reproduction from the human body and allow babies to be gestated by machines, usher in a different set of legal, ethical and social questions to those that arose from IVF. This book revisits the regulation of assisted reproduction and advances the debate on from the now much-discussed issues that arose from IVF, offering a critical analysis of the regulatory challenges raised by new reproductive technologies on the horizon.

In many US courts and internationally, family law cases constitute almost half of the trial caseload. These matters include child abuse and neglect and juvenile delinquency, as well as divorce, custody, paternity, and other traditional family law issues. In this book, the authors argue that reforms to the family justice system are necessary to enable it to assist families and children effectively. The authors propose an approach that envisions the family court as a "care center," by blending existing theories surrounding court reform in family law with an ethic of care and narrative practice. Building on conceptual, procedural, and structural reforms of the past several decades, the authors define the concept of a unified family court created along interdisciplinary lines - a paradigm that is particularly well suited to inform the work of family courts. These prior reforms have contributed to enhancing the family justice system, as courts now can shape comprehensive outcomes designed to improve the lives of families and children by taking into account both their legal and non-legal needs. In doing so, courts can utilize each family's story as a foundation to fashion a resolution of their unique issues. In the book, the authors aim to strengthen a court's problem-solving capabilities by discussing how incorporating an ethic of care and appreciating the family narrative can add to the court's effectiveness in responding to families and children. Creating the court as a care center, the authors conclude, should lie at the heart of how a family justice system operates. The authors are well-known figures in the area and have been involved in family court reform on both a US national and an international scale for many years.

This book is an essential guide on surrogacy, discussing various legal issues that arise in surrogacy cases. It provides a comprehensive coverage to various issues pertaining to surrogacy arrangements due to failure to meet the needs of those involved in surrogacy, be it the intended parents or the surrogate mother, with special emphasis on the most vulnerable party -- the surrogate child. In the wake of this existing imbalance, the call to reform the practice of surrogacy has also increased. The book provides a comprehensive coverage to various laws and policy regulations in existence dealing with surrogacy, and unravels the latest trends and developments happening around the world as surrogacy gains importance. The international perspectives highlight policies and practices being adopted and followed by various nations with regard to surrogacy regulation and associated parenthood rules. This book also analyses some of the significant cross-border disputes revolving around surrogacy, and explores briefly the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights on matters of parentage and citizenship for children born of trans-national surrogacy with special reference to the prospects of a convention on international surrogacy currently being studied by The Hague Conference on Private International Law. Further, it highlights the issues and questions relating to surrogacy arrangements that are so far unresolved and unanswered and suggests measures for improvements to the existing proposed surrogacy legislation in India and need for uniform international regulation. The book is a great resource for legal practitioners, academics, students, policy-makers, infertility clinics, and charitable organizations working on this issue.

In recent decades, there have been many changes to adoption law and practice, such as a sharp decline in the voluntary relinquishment of children, an increase in the number consigned to public care, and an abrupt decrease in those made available on an intercountry basis. Additionally, human rights are becoming more prominent, particularly in relation to issues such as: non-consensual adoption; the ethics of intercountry adoption; the eligibility of LGBT adopters; the impact of commercial surrogacy; and the sometimes conflicting rights of birth parents and adoptees when accessing agency birth records. In this book, O'Halloran presents a comparative analysis of the interaction between adoption law and human rights in common law (England and the US), civil law (France and Germany), and Asiatic traditions (Japan and China), while also developing a matrix of legal functions to assist in identifying and analysing areas of tension between human rights and adoption. This book is intended for a lawyer readership, whether professional, student or academic: researchers and postgraduate students in subjects such as social work, social policy and politics may also find it helpful.

Family Law offers an engaging and debate-driven guide to the subject, with each chapter crafted by a team of highly experienced teachers writing on their specialist subject under the expert editorship of Ruth Lamont. Each chapter is a superbly clear guide to the topic, structured around the key debates central to that topic, which are then explored in detail throughout the chapter. Students are thereby introduced to an enlightening range of perspectives on the key issues in family law today, allowing them to formulate their own opinions and arguments. The social, economic, and political backdrop to each topic is also extensively discusssed to ensure that students' understanding is grounded in this essential context. Family Law is a critical and modern guide to this dynamic subject.

The European Convention on Human Rights is one of the most influential human rights documents in existence, in terms of its scope, impact, and jurisdiction. Yet it was not drafted with children, let alone children's rights, in mind. Nevertheless, the European Court of Human Rights has developed a large body of jurisprudence regarding children, ranging from areas such as juvenile justice and immigration, to education and religion, and the protection of physical integrity. Its influence in the sphere of family law has been profound, in particular in the attribution of parenthood, and in cases concerning child abduction, child protection, and adoption. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the jurisprudence of the Court as it relates to children, highlighting its many achievements in this field, while also critiquing its ongoing weaknesses. In doing so, it tracks the evolution of the Court's treatment of children's rights, from its inauspicious and paternalistic beginnings to an emerging recognition of children's individual agency.