Much research has been done on medieval marriage in the last decades. However, few books have a pronouncedly comparative approach. This book discusses how much was regional and universal in medieval marriage law and practices in Europe. The sources used range from secular and canon law to court practice and from images to private correspondence. Articles discuss medieval and Reformation Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and Sweden. Both marriage formation and marital property, two intertwined aspects, are considered in the articles. The book offers fresh evidence on the scope of regional variation tolerated by the Church, regional practices, and European trends. Contributors are James A. Brundage, Cecilia Cristellon, Trevor Dean, Charles Donahue, Jr., Caroline Dunn, Mia Korpiola, Jurgita Kunsmanait, Anu Lahtinen, Anthony Musson, Philip L. Reynolds, Kirsi Salonen, Silvana Seidel Menchi, and Monique Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek.

Based on official records and reports, relevant secondary sources, and observations of members of the Convention's implementary organ, The Convention on the Rights of the Child describes and evaluates the first international human rights treaty to deal specifically with the rights and freedoms of the child. Mower deals first with the significance, origin, and development of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, then describes and analyzes its substantative content, procedures, and mechanisms for the Convention's implementation. He concludes with an examination of the factors that are most likely to determine the rate of progress toward the realization of the convention's goals. Based on official records, relevant secondary sources, and observations of members of the Convention's implementary organ, the book will be of considerable use to scholars and researchers in the fields of human rights and children's welfare.

This book contains an in-depth legal analysis of Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Convention on the Exercise of Children's Rights, the Council of Europe's Guidelines on Child-Friendly Justice and Recommendation on the participation of children, and the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the child's right to participate in family law proceedings, providing the first complete analysis of the international and European human rights instruments in this field. Of note, the book's analysis of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights is unique, in both the inclusion of all of the Court's judgments and decisions on child participation as well as the application of an innovative and rigorous method of qualitative content analysis. This book therefore provides a greater understanding of the child's right to participate under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Throughout the book, five key themes are addressed: the right to express views, due weight accorded to a child's views, the relevance of the child's age and maturity, the issue of undue influence, and the relevance of information and practical affairs. The standards provided in each of the instruments studied are compared and critically reflected upon. This book sets out the international and European framework for child participation and discusses critically how this framework can be further aligned and strengthened. New insights are reflected upon and recommendations made for the implementation and improvement of child participation rights at national and international levels.The Child's Right to Participate in Family Law Family Law Proceedings: Represented, Heard or Silenced? is a must read for scholars, family justice professionals, policy makers, and all persons working in the fields of children's rights and family law.

Children's access to justice has emerged as an important topic in the children's rights domain. While there has been increasing attention paid to child-friendly justice internationally, there has been relatively little research in this area. This book, with contributions from researchers and practitioners, explores the meaning, practice and challenges of children's access to justice and contributes to a deeper understanding of what access to justice means to children, how they experience it and what it should look like in practice. It seeks to define access to justice in a global way, by addressing current challenges, asking new questions and providing answers to existing problems. One of the main areas of focus is children's participation in legal proceedings, which critically explores how children are heard in family law, criminal law and child protection procedures. Special challenges faced by groups of children, such as indigenous children, are brought to light. The roles of different actors in justice, including judges and lawyers, but also institutions such as independent child commissioners and schools, and how they can improve children's access to justice are explored. The book also highlights structural obstacles to children's participation that can be explained by country-specific situations and the attitudes of adults towards children. Many of the contributions are based on empirical research, bringing forth the voices of actors of justice and children themselves. While many of these contributions are county-specific, the book clearly demonstrates how challenges to children's access to justice are universal in nature.

This book is a multi-disciplinary collection of essays from leading researchers and practitioners, exploring legal, ethical, social, psychological and practical aspects of surrogate motherhood in Britain and abroad. It highlights the common themes that characterise debates across countries as well as exploring the many differences in policies and practices. Surrogacy raises questions for medical and welfare practitioners and dilemmas for policy makers as well as ethical issues of concern to society as a whole. The international perspective adopted by this book offers an opportunity for questions of law, policy and practice to be shared and debated across countries. The book links contemporary views from research and practice with broader social issues and bio-ethical debates. The book will be of interest to an international audience of academics and their students (in law, social policy, reproductive medicine, psychology and sociology), practitioners (including doctors, counsellors, midwives and welfare professionals) as well as those involved in policy-making and implementation.

This collection of essays is the product of a series of seminars held at the University of Cambridge in 1998 under the auspices of the newly formed Cambridge Socio-Legal Group. The book presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of parenthood and its various manifestations in contemporary society. It is divided into three sections dealing respectively with defining parenthood,new issues in contemporary parenting and parenting post-divorce. Each contributor addresses the central question 'What is a Parent?' from the perspective of his or her own discipline, thus bringing together ideas about parents derived from law, sociology, psychology, biology and criminology. Despite the familiar and apparently obvious answer to this question the notion of 'parent' emerges from the analysis as a contested concept. Definitions are various and fluid, parenting practices are by no means fixed, and ideologies which frame who parents are and what they do are subject to disruptions from several quarters. In short, the essays in this book show the ways in which 'parent' like 'child' is a term with a shifting meaning and 'parenthood' refers to a fluid set of social practices which are historically and culturally situated. Contributors: Andrew Bainham, Carol Brayne, Stuart Bridge, Rachel Cook, Shelley Day Sclater, Margaret Ely, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Susan Golombok, Jack Goody, Jonathan Herring, Felicia Huppert, Allison James, Martin Johnson, Bridget Lindley, Mavis Maclean, Juliet Mitchell, Ros Pickford, Martin Richards, Wendy Solomou, Candida Yates.

The clergy abuse scandal has posed the greatest threat to the traditional understanding of the Catholic priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. Now, as then, the deadliest attacks are coming from within the Church. In an attempt to improve a system that allowed a small minority of the clergy to violate children and ameliorate the gross negligence of some bishops who recycled these predators, the American bishops instituted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. It is, unfortunately, doing the Church more harm than good.

In Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, Fr. James Valladares shows how justice and charity have been violated by some bishops in dealing with accused priests. He examines the pertinent canons that guide the Church's judicial system and finds that these are often ignored or wrongly applied. He provides true cases that highlight the injustice of the process and the agony of priests who have been subjected to the charter's draconian mandates.

The Church has incurred tremendous financial losses because of settlements rising from both legitimate and false claims. Her image has been marred by the secular media, which has taken advantage of the crisis. Even so, we often fail to understand how trivial these are in comparison to the damage done to the priesthood by the enactment of the charter's policies. This is the most pressing issue that the bishops need to address.

"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.

Battering States explores the most personal part of people's lives as they intersect with a uniquely complex state system. The book examines how statecraft shapes domestic violence: how a state defines itself and determines what counts as a family; how a state establishes sovereignty and defends its borders; and how a state organizes its legal system and forges its economy. The ethnography includes stories from people, places, and perspectives not commonly incorporated in domestic violence studies, and, in doing so, reveals the transformation of intimate partner violence from a predictable form of marital trouble to a publicly recognized social problem. The politics of domestic violence create novel entry points to understanding how, although women may be vulnerable to gender-based violence, they do not necessarily share the same kind of belonging to the state. This means that markers of identity and power, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion and religiosity, and socio-economic and geographic location, matter when it comes to safety and pathways to justice. The study centers on Israel, where a number of factors bring connections between the cultural politics of the state and domestic violence into stark relief: the presence of a contentious multinational and multiethnic population; competing and overlapping sets of religious and civil laws; a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor; and the dominant presence of a security state in people's everyday lives. The exact combination of these factors is unique to Israel, but they are typical of states with a diverse population in a time of globalization. In this way, the example of Israel offers insights wherever the political and personal impinge on one another.

This book explores the normative and legal evolution of the Social Dimension - labour law, social security law and family law - in both the EU and its Member States, during the last decade. It does this from a wide range of theoretical and legal-substantive perspectives. The past decade has witnessed the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty and its emphasis on fundamental rights, a new coordination regulation within the field of social security (Regulation 883/2004/EC), and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the so-called Laval Quartet. Furthermore structural changes affecting demographics and family have also challenged solidarity in new ways. The book is organised by reference to distinct 'normative patterns' and their development in the fields of law covered, such as the protection of established groups, the position of market functional values and the scope for just distribution. The book represents an innovative and important interdisciplinary approach to analysing EU law and Social Europe, and contributes a complex, yet thought-provoking, picture for the future. The contributors represent an interesting mix of well-known and distinguished as well as upcoming and promising researchers throughout Europe and beyond.

Each individual experiences obligations arising from personal relationships. These are often hard to fulfil and give rise to tension between the demands of various relationships,between meeting current or future needs, but also between private norms and the demands of a public set of rules. The international contributors to this volume consider the relationship between family law and family values in the way law is framed, the way we are developing the legal context for new kinds of relationships such as cross-household parenting, same-sex partner relationships, and the obligations of adults to elders, and closes with a plea to rethink family law in terms of the functions we want it to perform. Contributors include Masha Antokolskaia, Benoit Bastard, John Eekelaar, Lisa Glennon, Jacek Kurczewski, Jane Lewis, Carol Smart, Velina Todorova and Jean van Houtte.

Concepts of who and what children are and what childhood consists of have changed over time. Our historical and contemporary notions of childhood also change according to the context of the interaction between the child and the state. This book is concerned with various ideas of what childhood consists of where the child is involved with the legal system. An identification of legal concepts of childhood can offer many insights into our treatment of children,the capacities which we expect them (possibly unfairly) to possess and the extent of any protection which they deserve or can expect from those charged with the responsibility for their welfare. Each essay in this collection focuses on a particular legal discipline which centrally involves children whether as litigants, victims or perpetrators of crimes, owners of property, recipients of welfare services etc. The object of the analysis is to assess how children are regarded by lawyers in each discipline; for example, as objects of concern, requiring protection; as autonomous possessors of rights; as lacking in moral consciousness or full mental capacity; or as fully aware of and accountable for their actions. In order to make comparisons with notions of childhood in other contexts, the substantive part of the book will also include essays on the perspectives on childhood at the core of other disciplines including sociology, psychology, philosophy and literature.

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine.

The International Society of Family Law is an independent, international, and non-political scholarly association dedicated to the study, research and discussion of family law and related disciplines. The Society's membership currently includes professors, lecturers, scholars, teachers, and researchers from more than 50 different countries, offering a unique opportunity for networking within a truly international family law community. The International Survey of Family Law is the annual review of the International Society of Family Law. It brings together reliable and clearly structured insights into the latest and most notable developments in family law from all around the globe. Chapters are prepared by an international team of selected experts in the field, usually covering 20 or more jurisdictions in each edition.

In National Socialist Family Law, Mariken Lenaerts analyses the possible influence of National Socialism on marriage and divorce law in Germany and the Netherlands. As the family was regarded the germ-cell of the nation, the Nazis made many changes in German and Dutch marriage and divorce law to suit their purpose of a thousand-year Aryan Reich. By making extensive use of archival resources, Mariken Lenaerts gives an overview of the most important changes adopted in marriage and divorce law by the Nazis and proves that although daily marital life in both countries was highly influenced by National Socialism, marriage and divorce law did not become National Socialist. Listen to Lenaerts explaining about her project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TINKR6xKyUQ. In 2013 the book was awarded the Prix Fondation Auschwitz - Jacques Rozenberg.

This research review provides a comprehensive overview of children's human rights. Beginning with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world, it explores the theory, doctrine, and implementation of the legal frameworks addressing child labor, child soldiers, and child trafficking, as well as children's socio-economic rights, including their rights to education. This topical research review is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and activists.

Personal status laws remain a highly politicized area of debate in the Middle East, as the arena in which the contentious issues of women's rights, religion and minority groups meet. This is especially so when it comes to divorce. In Tunisia, with the moderate Islamist party Ennahda winning the first elections following the 2011 revolution, questions of religion in public life have gained greater primacy. The country is often hailed for its progressive personal status code, seen as an exception to the practice in many other Muslim countries. Polygamy is banned, for example, and in divorce cases there is gender equality. However, Tunisia's legal system contains many gaps and leaves much room for interpretation. Bearing in mind this importance of the role of Islam in judicial courts, Maaike Voorhoeve investigates whether the more progressive, and ostensibly secular, principles enshrined in Tunisia's Personal Status Code of 1956 are in fact adhered to in divorce cases. And if not, whether judges frequently turn to the Sharia, custom or societal norms as their primary sources of guidance. Through extensive research in the Tunisian courts, Voorhoeve investigates the different types of divorce, the arguments presented to the court and the consequent legal decisions made. She focuses on the role of female judges, testing the assumption that they adjudicate in a more gender-neutral way and examining the impact they have had on Tunisian legal culture and through this, Tunisian society. Gender and Divorce Law in North Africa therefore sheds light on the wide-reaching debate throughout North Africa and the Middle East concerning the role of Islam and Sharia in the public, political, legal and private spheres. This debate, which often pits secularists against Islamists, but is in reality much more nuanced, is key in a variety of fields, including Middle East studies and Islamic law.

The Right to be Parents is the first book to provide a detailed history of how LGBT parents have turned to the courts to protect and defend their relationships with their children. Carlos A. Ball chronicles the stories of LGBT parents who, in seeking to gain legal recognition of and protection for their relationships with their children, have fundamentally changed how American law defines and regulates parenthood. To this day, some courts are still not able to look beyond sexual orientation and gender identity in cases involving LGBT parents and their children. Yet on the whole, Ball's stories are of progress and transformation: as a result of these pioneering LGBT parent litigants, the law is increasingly recognizing the wide diversity in American familial structures.

Using original empirical data and critiquing existing research, Samia Bano explores the experience of British Muslim woman who use Shari'ah councils to resolve marital disputes. She challenges the language of community rights and claims for legal autonomy in matters of family law showing how law and community can empower as well as restrict women.

This comprehensive and in-depth study on the understanding and interpretation of the child's right to survival and development provides a compact assessment of article 6(2) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in light of its drafting history, the reports of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and other relevant sources appropriate to the discipline of international human rights law.The author analyses the travaux prparatoires of the CRC and the academic work of some of its drafters. The book includes an interview with one of the drafters and explores the literature of the Committee on the Rights of the Child with respect to article 6(2) and how its understanding and interpretations of this article have developed over time. It examines the weaknesses and strengths in relation to the observations it has made and explores the legal effects of the Committee's classifications and makes suggestions for others as well.Importantly, the book also discusses the relationship between the right of the child to survival and development and his/her dignity. It provides an understanding of the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and cognitive development in the context of his/her right to survival and development. In addition, the author discusses various State obligations aiming at the enjoyment of the right to survival and development and also touches on global warming and its relationship with the right of the child to survival and development.The reader will gain an understanding of different approaches to the interpretation of human rights treaties in general, and attitudes towards the assessment of the work of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. He will also learn about the connection between the right to development and the economic and social rights of the child on the one hand, and the right of the child to survival and development on the other hand. Moreover, the book introduces the concept of comprehensiveness and individuality of the right of the child to survival and development and fundamentally argues that there is still more to add to the understanding and interpretations of article 6(2) of the CRC.

This second edition collection of Legal Letters written by Attorney Andrew Agatston to Children's Advocacy Centers, child advocates and detectives builds upon the 2009 book, "The Legal Eagles of Children's Advocacy Centers: A Lawyer's Guide to Soaring in the Courtroom." It is critical for Children's Advocacy Center professionals, and others who work on behalf of children who have alleged sexual abuse, to have a thorough understanding of the legal system and the legal rules and requirements that directly affect their professional responsibilities. This book is a second collection of Legal Letters that Mr. Agatston has written to his "Legal Eagles" as part of his weekly List Serv that now has subscribers in 35 states.