Family law draws from constitutional law as well as from criminal law, conflict laws, and the laws of contracts, torts, property, inheritance, and even taxation. This comprehensive review inspects the creation of marriage relationships, spousal rights and obligations, parent and child relationships, marriage termination, and the economic consequences of divorce.

This casebook provides a comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date analysis of family law from comparative and private international law perspectives. It emphasizes the need to examine complex cross-border family situations by comparing legal systems and understanding the jurisdictional overlay, with a particular focus on the United States. The casebook addresses some of the most intimate and legally complicated situations in which cross-border families find themselves, including the validity of foreign marriages, simultaneous divorce proceedings in multiple countries, the changing law in creating families using adoption and assisted reproductive technology, and how to remedy an international parental child abduction. In addition, the book dives into the importance of judicial assistance treaties and laws when understanding the legal issues, including the necessity to have proper service in a foreign country, obtaining evidence overseas, and authenticating foreign public documents. This book is a superb companion for law students and practitioners alike, and can readily be used in a traditional theory-based class and in practicum courses. It provides substantive material for a course on International Family Law, or can supplement a course on Family Law, International Law, or Comparative Law.

Mastering Family Law helps students understand the basic principles and underlying policies of the topics covered in a general family law course. The content in this book is drawn from the table of contents of all the major family law teaching texts and includes all of the major topics covered in those texts. Consequently, a student will find this book a helpful supplement to any family law casebook. The book includes traditional family law topics such as marriage and divorce, but also covers child law topics such as the constitutional rights of parents and the definition of parents, among others. It provides a roadmap at the beginning of each chapter to focus attention on the important topics that will be addressed and a checkpoints list at the end of each chapter to summarize the important concepts as an aid to student comprehension and retention. The book is written in a student-friendly style designed to present the major concepts in easily understood language.

One of the law’s most important and far-reaching roles is to govern family life and family members. Family law decides who counts as kin, how family relationships are created and dissolved, and what legal rights and responsibilities come with marriage, parenthood, sibling ties, and other family bonds. Yet despite its significance, the field remains remarkably understudied and poorly understood both within and outside the legal community. Family Law Reimagined is the first book to evaluate the canonical narratives, examples, and ideas that legal decisionmakers repeatedly invoke to explain family law and its governing principles. These stories contend that family law is exclusively local, that it repudiates market principles, that it has eradicated the imprint of common law doctrines which subordinated married women, that it is dominated by contract rules permitting individuals to structure their relationships as they choose, and that it consistently prioritizes children’s interests over parents’ rights. In this book, Jill Elaine Hasday reveals how family law’s canon misdescribes the reality of family law, misdirects attention away from the actual problems that family law confronts, and misshapes the policies that legal authorities pursue. She demonstrates how much of the “common sense” that decisionmakers expound about family law actually makes little sense. Family Law Reimagined uncovers and critiques the family law canon and outlines a path to reform. Challenging conventional answers and asking questions that judges and lawmakers routinely overlook, it calls on us to reimagine family law.

Few areas of law practice cover as many issues as family law. The subject embraces marriage and divorce, annulment, custody of children, spousal and child support, complex property issues, paternity, domestic violence, adoption, and alternative means of reproduction. Each of these topics itself is complex. For example, within the broad subject of child custody lie the issues of interstate move away cases, international parental child abduction, and the impact of domestic violence on a parent's right to custody or visitation. In addition to purely legal issues, family law has a large psychological component, touching on some of the most important and sensitive aspects of human nature and interaction, such as, what is a family, what are the rights and responsibilities of parents toward children, and how should society respond to child abuse and domestic violence? All of these issues, and more, are discussed in this Nutshell. The book provides a thorough introduction to this challenging field of practice.

Is the unification and harmonisation of (international) family law in Europe necessary? Is it feasible, desirable and possible? Reading the different contributions to this book may certainly inspire those who would like to find the right answers to these questions.