Implementation of Islamic family law varies widely across North Africa and the Middle East, here Dörthe Engelcke explores the reasons for this.

How does a nation, defeated in war, respond to externally imposed reforms that set that nations family system upside down, completely eliminating the familys modus operandi At least that is what the elimination of family kinship and single inheritance in reforms by the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in the 1948 Civil Code was meant to do. How did the Japanese respond to these reforms in Family Law that many believed would result in the destruction of the family? This study looks at succession and adoption in the years following the reform to understand how the Japanese were able to circumvent the Code and shape the family to meet their evolving needs.

This collection provides a snapshot of big ideas in family law reform. The book asks: If you could change one part of family law, what would it be? This deceptively simple question is answered by 10 family law experts and debated within the volume by expert respondents. The book puts the proposal first, forcing authors (and their respondents) to critically engage with what family law should look like, and where the development of law is needed to address the changing landscape of family life. Globalisation, cultural and religious diversity, the use of technology and changes in societal attitudes towards marriage and parenthood have all had an impact on the continuing evolution of families. As a consequence, the law has some very complex challenges to address in its attempt to regulate the diversity of family life. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars of family law and serves as a pair to Hart Publishing's landmark Criminal Law Reform Now.

A wide-ranging analysis of grass-roots activism, migration, legal, political and religious changes as basis for social transformation.

There are few areas of public policy in the Western world where there is as much turbulence as in family law. Often the disputes are seen in terms of an endless war between the genders. Reviewing developments over the last 30 years in North America, Europe and Australasia, Patrick Parkinson argues that, rather than just being about gender, the conflicts in family law derive from the breakdown of the model on which divorce reform was predicated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Experience has shown that although marriage may be freely dissoluble, parenthood is not. Dealing with the most difficult issues in family law, this book charts a path for law reform that recognizes that the family endures despite the separation of parents, while allowing room for people to make a fresh start and prioritizing the safety of all concerned when making decisions about parenting after separation.

The legal status, responsibilities and rights of men who are fathers - married or unmarried, cohabiting or separated, biological or social in nature - is a topic with a long and well-documented history. Yet recent developments in a number of countries suggest a growing politicisation of the relationship between law and fatherhood. In some countries, an increasingly vocal, visible and well-organised fathers' rights movement has been credited with influencing perceptions of the politics of family justice. Fathers, it is argued, have become the new victims of family law justice systems that have swung 'too far' in favour of mothers. Armed with such claims, fathers' rights activists have set out to achieve a range of legal reforms, most notably in the areas of child support law and contact and residence rights following separation. This book presents an attempt to understand these developments. Bringing together leading international commentators it provides a careful, critical and comparative analysis of the work of fathers' rights activists, the role law has played in their campaigning, their legal strategies, their success (or otherwise) in achieving legal reform, similarities and divergences with the women's movement, and the relationship between fathers' rights movements and the societies that frame them. In addition to Collier and Sheldon, contributors include: Susan B Boyd (University of British Columbia, Canada), Jocelyn Crowley (Rutgers University, USA), Maria Eriksson (Goteborg University, Sweden), Keith Pringle (Aalborg University, Denmark), Helen Rhoades (Melbourne University, Australia), and Carol Smart (Manchester University, UK).