Legal recognition of non-conjugal families: new frontiers in family law in the US, Canada and Europe, by Nausica Palazzo, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2021, 248 pp, 185, ISBN: 9781509939954. What makes a family? Ask a philosopher, sociologist, biologist – all will have a different answer. Though we all may intuitively feel we understand who our family is, pinpointing why has never been an easy task. Yet as any family lawyer will tell you, this is not a matter of purely academic Interest. Legal recognition of these relationships has not only symbolic importance, but also brings with it a host of practical benefits. Often, these are designed to buttress the informal patterns of care that society relies on. A major challenge for the discipline, therefore, has been how to respond to the seismic social changes of recent decades. In particular, family law regulators have been confronted with the increasing reality that citizens no longer rely exclusively (or even primarily) on state approved relationships. This was seen first in the rise of cohabiting partners, perhaps most notably in the fight for same sex marriage …
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Sylvie Armstrong, Book Review: Legal recognition of non-conjugal families: new frontiers in family law in the US, Canada and Europe by Nausica Palazzo, Jurisprudence – An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1080/20403313.2021.1914971. Published online: 19 April 2021.
First posted 2021-04-21 11:45:43
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