Category Archives: Family Law
Alistair MacDonald, ‘The Remote Family Access Family Court – what have we learnt so far’
INTRODUCTION It is a truism that we cannot know what the future will hold. Recently, this has been demonstrated to me in stark terms. On 1 February 2020 I delivered a speech to the Four Jurisdictions conference, held in Malaga in the days when we could interact with each other face to face; in the […]
David Crump, ‘The Tort of Interference with Custody: A Tale of Two Jurisdictions’
ABSTRACT Interference with custody is a malignant tort. As a result, most jurisdictions have recognized liability for the underlying conduct through the common law or by statute. But the proper function of this legal theory requires balanced adjudication. When former spouses are cooperative, they usually act informally to adjust visitation, and a jurisdiction that applies […]
‘Reflections on Family Law’
Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019). For those of us who spend any appreciable amount of time online – and lately, that is likely many of us – it has been difficult to miss Jia Tolentino’s recently published book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, which has enjoyed some measure of digital fame, appearing […]
Katharine Baker, ‘What is Nonmarriage?’
ABSTRACT As rates of cohabitation rise and marriage becomes a status reserved almost exclusively for socio-economic elites, the scholarly calls for family law to recognize more nonmarital families grow stronger by the day. This article unpacks contemporary proposals to recognize more nonmarital families and juxtaposes those proposals with family law’s contemporary marital regime. Contemporary family […]
Ayelet Blecher-Prigat, ‘Echoes of Nonmarriage’
ABSTRACT This Article aims to draw attention to the dynamic interrelationship between nonmarriage and marriage in which the principles, values, and rhetoric used in laws that relate to nonmarital intimate relationships infiltrate the traditional laws governing marriage. The Article argues that the laws governing nonmarriage affect the legal institution of marriage inasmuch as the laws […]
Douglas and Gilmore, ‘The (Il)legitimacy of Guideline Judgments in Family Law: The Case for Foundational Principles’
INTRODUCTION In this paper, we interrogate the legitimate bounds of the judicial development of family law in England and Wales. Reflecting the nature of much of family law, our focus is on judicial engagement with statutes, within which a major concentration of the work of the family law judges is guiding and supervising statutorily conferred […]
Nishat Hyder-Rahman, ‘Consent and the Protection of the Deceased’s Interests in Posthumous Reproduction’
ABSTRACT The phenomenon of posthumous reproduction (PR) is challenging traditional notions of family structure, composition and chronology; at the same time, it is posing a novel challenge to the discourse on posthumous harms and interests in terms of the deceased’s reproductive narrative. To some extent, these fundamental challenges are reflected in the jurisprudence on PR […]
Kaiponanea Matsumura, ‘Beyond Property: The Other Legal Consequences of Informal Relationships’
ABSTRACT To this point, scholars analyzing nonmarital relationships have primarily focused on the challenge of determining the economic consequences of cohabitation. Yet property distribution, while significant, is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Married people qualify for a wide range of benefits from the government as well as private employers. These benefits, such […]
Alistair MacDonald, ‘Family Law – Past and Future’
“… What has however, undergone fundamental change over the past twenty five years is the nature and scope of the problems to which these stable legal principles must be applied in order to try to achieve resolution for children and families. This is a function of the central role played by family law in the […]
‘How the Law Expects and Accommodates Deceit in Courtship, Sex, and Marriage’
“This post turns to a new aspect of the legal history of intimate deception. When I started researching Intimate Lies and the Law, I suspected that judges might deny remedies to deceived intimates because they thought deception within intimacy was too trivial a subject to be worth judicial attention. However, I soon discovered that many […]