Family, Law and Society – Serie

Domestic violence - domestic hooliganism it has been called - is one of the cancers of our age. This volume offers a challenging selection of materials as a picture of a multi-faceted problem. The issues embraced range from criminal and civil law responses and the value of mediation, to the impact on children, and to the cultural context. The materials are derived from a variety of sources and from different disciplines to offer the reader an understanding of the problem not easily culled from standard library resources.

This volume brings together some of the best journal articles of the last twenty years which deal with various aspects of the relationship between parents and children. Adopting an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach, the book reproduces articles from a variety of journals in law and the social sciences. The book is divided into eight parts dealing, respectively, with becoming a parent; the status and obligations of parenthood; issues of upbringing; adolescence; child support; parental separation, divorce and children; child abuse and state intervention; social parenthood and adoption. The volume includes a substantial introduction by the editor.

With the accelerating movement of individuals and families across national borders, the intersections of cultural and legal frameworks have become increasingly complex. The Multi-Cultural Family collects essays from around the world on the challenges of legal pluralism, minority religious communities and customary or indigenous law, with attention paid to marriage and divorce, as well as child custody and adoption, family violence and dispute resolution.

Over the past two decades, virtually all areas of family law have undergone major doctrinal and theoretical changes - from the definition of marriage, to the financial and parenting consequences of divorce, to the legal construction of parenthood. An equally important set of changes has transformed the resolution of family disputes. This 'paradigm shift' in family conflict resolution has reshaped the practice of family law and has fundamentally altered the way in which disputing families interact with the legal system. Moreover, the changes have important implications for the way that family law is understood and taught. This volume examines the contours of this paradigm shift in family conflict resolution and explores its implications for family law scholarship and practice. The interdisciplinary compilation includes contributions from lawyers, legal academics, social scientists and mental health professionals. As the articles in the volume demonstrate, the transformation in family conflict resolution holds considerable promise for disputing families, but it also raises a number of challenges. These challenges include concerns about the institutional competence of courts, the surrender of fact-finding and decision-making to individuals without legal training, the loss of autonomy and privacy for family members subject to continuing court oversight and the disjunction between problem-solving justice and authoritative legal norms. By exploring both the promise of the new paradigm and its potential pitfalls, this volume engages family law scholars and offers insights to judges, practitioners and policy makers responsible for serving families in conflict.