Category Archives: Family Law
Open consultation: ‘A fairer end to relationships’ (UK Ministry of Justice)
This consultation brings together three connected areas of reform affecting families when relationships end. 1. Reforming the law of financial remedies on divorce and dissolution. The Law Commission’s 2024 scoping report identified a lack of certainty and accessibility in the current law. To address this the government invites views on a ‘codification-plus’ model of reform, […]
Helen Rodway, ‘A human rights framing of cohabitation reform’
ABSTRACT Despite the exponential rise in the number of couples cohabiting, across Europe, cohabitants are unable to access comprehensive legal protections. To strengthen calls for reform, this paper advocates for the adoption of a human rights framing and traces its potential development. It begins with an analysis of the current discourse and offers an explanation […]
‘Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia: A profound shift in how Canadian tort law recognises and redresses intimate partner violence – but what will the material impacts be for survivors?’
In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia 2026 SCC 16, the Supreme Court of Canada recognised (6-3) a new tort of intimate partner violence, based on coercive and controlling behaviour, overturning the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision that the character of intimate partner violence could be captured by the existing torts of battery, assault and intention to inflict […]
Nadia Rusinova, ‘From tort to family law: compensation for cross-border child abduction’
ABSTRACT This article explores the emerging field of intra-family torts, with a particular focus on cross-border child abduction and the law applicable to compensation claims. It traces the historical reluctance of courts to recognise civil liability within families, the erosion of spousal and parental immunities, and the gradual acceptance of claims for serious wrongs between […]
‘Who Wants What?’
John Morley and Yair Listokin, ‘What Should You Owe Your Ex? A Survey of Attitudes About the Law of Married and Cohabiting Relationships’ (14 March 2026) (unpublished manuscript), available at SSRN. Law has mostly dealt with unmarried couples by adopting a wait-and-see approach. Rather than states passing legislation ex ante, courts address issues that arise […]
Dana Roemling, ‘Statutory Interpretation and Corpus Evidence: Tensions Between Linguistic Reality and Legal Meaning’
ABSTRACT This paper examines how linguistic meaning interacts with legal interpretation for the statutory term child, focusing on the 2013 Alabama Supreme Court case Ex parte Ankrom. In that case, the court held that child includes unborn individuals under chemical endangerment laws, a decision that raises important questions about how ordinary meaning is established. Using […]
Ira Chadha-Sridhar, ‘The Legal Concept of Care’
ABSTRACT The notion of ‘care’ is invoked within legal doctrine in the law of tort, medical law, and family law. Yet despite its centrality across these doctrinal domains, these invocations have rarely been studied together. This neglect seems to stem from an underlying assumption that ‘care’ refers to fundamentally different things in each context – […]
NeJaime and Joslin, ‘The Legal Recognition of Multiparent Families: Findings from an Empirical Study’
ABSTRACT Statutes in a growing number of states authorize a court to recognize more than two legal parents of a child. Commentators tend to treat both multiparent legal recognition and the multiparent families they capture as novel and cutting-edge. Through an empirical study, we show that multiparent recognition and multiparent families are neither novel nor […]
Patrick Parkinson, ‘When All Roads Lead To Rome: The Problem of Treating De Facto Relationships as Marriages in Australia’
ABSTRACT In Australia, all de facto relationships lasting more than two years, or where there is a child born to the relationship, are treated as if they are marriages for the purposes of property division. This article critiques this, arguing that there is a lot of uncertainty about how frequently couples need to be together […]
Nicole Štýbnarová, ‘Economic Dimensions of International Regulation of Marriage’
ABSTRACT This Article examines how the regulation of, and legal argumentation about, transnational marriages fulfill economic functions. It takes as its point of departure contemporary legal frameworks governing marriages with a transnational element in Northwestern Europe, including private international law (conflicts of laws), migration law, and human rights law. It shows that lawmakers and judges […]