Category Archives: Family Law
Rachel Leow, ‘Can parents sell their children’s property? A property law perspective’
INTRODUCTION Christmas arrives. Nicki’s nine-year-old son receives a gaming console and many soft toys as Christmas gifts from his doting relatives, each of them delivering the gift right into her son’s hands. Nicki, however, is annoyed. Her son has far too many soft toys: his entire room is covered in them. Nor does her son […]
Clare Ryan, ‘The Public/Private Home’
ABSTRACT Families today are more private and more public than traditional family law doctrine ever envisioned. This Article reveals how many elements of family life, which the law often assumes will occur in public – work, school, social life – have moved into the private sphere of the home. While at the same time, private […]
Mason Clark, ‘It Takes a Village (to Raise Children’s Privacy)’
ABSTRACT Raising children is an expensive and (mostly) rewarding commitment. Many parents, guardians, and caregivers are willing to invest in indestructible car seats, private schools, and organic, farm-fresh, whole-grain, low-sugar, dye-free, naturally flavored foods. Is it reasonable to ask them to invest in children’s privacy? Surely companies can’t expect parents to stand guard at the […]
James Toomey, ‘Parents as Liberal Fiduciaries’
ABSTRACT The relationship between parents and children is unique in the law. On the one hand, parents exercise more power over their children than in any legal relationship other than ownership; but parents, unlike owners, must act to promote their children’s welfare. At the same time, the parent-child relationship poses perhaps the single most difficult […]
Emily Stolzenberg, ‘Toward a Private Law of Intimates’ Obligations’
ABSTRACT When former cohabitants ask courts to distribute property at the end of a nonmarital relationship, they usually lose – even when the partners were as economically intertwined as spouses. Family law scholars have traditionally criticized these cases in terms of longstanding gendered ideas about family relationships. This Article proposes a complementary account at the […]
Yasin Alperen Karaşahin, ‘Wedding gifts in Turkish law’
ABSTRACT In Turkish weddings, the gifts usually consist of golden items that are liquid assets and can have a substantial value. Until recently, it was the constant case law of the Turkish Court of Cassation that they were owned by the woman regardless of who gave it to whom. This case law, which could be […]
‘Leveraging Trust Law to Protect Child Influencers’
Naomi Cahn, ‘Trusting Remedies for the Child Influencer Space: Blocked Trust Accounts and Child Beneficiaries’, 17 Drexel Law Review 971 (2025). Professor Naomi Cahn’s recent article, ‘Trusting Remedies for the Child Influencer Space: Blocked Trust Accounts and Child Beneficiaries’, exists at the intersection of centuries-old legal doctrine and the technology-based influencer economy. The family influencer, […]
John Rimmer, ‘“Who then is my child?”’
ABSTRACT It is easy to make assumptions about who is, and who is not, the ‘child’ of an individual. In the past, the main question was whether someone was the legitimate child of another. As society and technology have changed, the meaning of ‘child’ has changed to accommodate such matters as adoption, IVF, surrogacy, and […]
‘What We Can Learn from Family Abolition’
Susan Frelich Appleton and Albertina Antognini, ‘Abolishing the Family’, 61 Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (1 August 2025). There are benefits to thinking about extreme proposals – suggested utopias and radical restructurings of institutions. However unlikely it might be that such proposals are ever put into effect, […]
Jobling and Dolphin, ‘Are pets truly members of the family? New provisions relating to “companion animals” in the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth)’
ABSTRACT This article considers the new provisions to the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) (‘FLA’) that came into effect in June 2025, which recognise ‘companion animals’ as a category of property to be dealt with upon a relationship breakdown. Animals have not been included in the FLA previously; the new provisions are significant as they […]