1. Introduction to Family Law

Author(s):  
Sonia Harris-Short ◽  
Joanna Miles ◽  
Rob George

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter begins with an overview of families and family law in England and Wales today. It then discusses themes and issues in contemporary family law, covering rules versus discretion; women’s and men’s perspectives on family law; sex and gender identity; sexual orientation; cultural diversity; and state intervention versus private ordering, including the role of the family court and of non-court dispute resolution in family cases.


Family Law ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Joanna Miles ◽  
Rob George ◽  
Sonia Harris-Short

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter begins with an overview of families and family law in England and Wales today. It then discusses themes and issues in contemporary family law, covering rules versus discretion; women’s and men’s perspectives on family law; sex and gender identity; sexual orientation; cultural diversity; and state intervention versus private ordering, including the role of the family court and of non-court dispute resolution in family cases, and challenges facing the family justice system.



1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Seymour


Although women’s participation in the workforce has increased remarkably in recent times but women are still lagging behind because of the traditional thinking and attitudes of their families in the context of Bangladesh. The purpose of the current study was to explore the role of the family in shaping women’s career development. The study was conducted in a qualitative approach and it was exploratory in nature. The study was conducted during November-December, 2019 in Khulna division, Bangladesh. The purposive sampling procedure was used to select the 25 respondents of the study. The respondents constituted of working women from different professions. Primary data was collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews extending from 35 to 45 minutes. The collected data were analyzed using thematic analysis method and nine themes emerged from the transcripts. The emerged themes were acceptance and aspiration from family, spousal support, being a mother, grown-up children as helping hands, family and work balance, family as a social network, family as a barrier, family as a lever, and gender inequality. This research highlighted the fact that women’s career practices and its development depended highly on familial roles. The family possesses the ability to affect women’s career success both positively and negatively. The study revealed that women who received positive support from their families were more motivated and achieved greater success in their professional life. Family can serve both as a lever as well as a barrier in shaping a woman’s career.



2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Holleran ◽  
Bruce D. Stout

In this study, we examine how important juvenile race and other factors are in juvenile commitment classification in the New Jersey Family Court. Data from the Family Court in New Jersey for the year 2010 comprise the population. Given the class imbalance in the dependent variable, we employ balanced random forest (RF). Variable importance plots and an information gain summary are used to assess the role of the juvenile’s race and other variables for classes of the dependent variable. The results from balanced RF indicate that the juvenile’s delinquency history and the offense seriousness make the most important contributions to commitment to juvenile state incarceration. The juvenile’s race makes a very weak contribution to commitment; in fact, when the balanced RF was rerun with the juvenile’s race omitted, the estimated misclassification error slightly dropped for commitments. Balanced RF is an attractive procedure for handling dependent variables with highly imbalanced classes. The juvenile’s adjudication history and offense seriousness emerged as the most important variables to state incarceration. The race of the juvenile was not an important variable with respect to commitment.



PEDIATRICS ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 796-798
Author(s):  
Florence M. Kelley

It is important to know what the courts can do and cannot do in the area of abused and neglected children. Often the Family Court is listed as an agency. It is not an agency. It is part of the court system. Its operation is circumscribed by the concept of being a real court. For a long time there was a theory that the Family Court or Juvenile Court could be a kind of social work oriented operation, not quite a real court, not truly a social work agency. This concept has been abandoned. The Family Court is a court of record and is in all aspects a court. It is dependent in the action it takes on evidence which must conform to strict rules that are laid down. It is an adversary proceeding. It is not enough to produce a child that looks as if it has been beaten. A judge in the Family Court also has before him the person who may be charged with having beaten the child. That person, be it a parent or guardian, is entitled to counsel, to help in his defense. The adversary process then takes place. Persons bring forth evidence to show that the parent did abuse the child. The parent is enabled under the court system to bring forth before the judge evidence that he or she did not do it. It is then up to the judge to give this evidence due weight and make a decision as to whether or not the allegations have been proven.



Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grossman ◽  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter describes what might be the last battleground over “traditional” marriage—same-sex marriage, and the social and legal revolution that brought us from an era in which it was never contemplated to one in which, depending on the state, it is either expressly authorized or expressly prohibited. Same-sex marriage has posed—and continues to pose—a challenge to traditional definitions of marriage and family. But, more importantly, the issue implies broader changes in family law—the increasing role of constitutional analysis; limits on the right of government to regulate the family; and the clash between the traditional family form and a new and wider menu of intimate and household arrangements, and all this against the background of the rise of a stronger form of individualism.



Author(s):  
Chris Gilleard ◽  
Paul Higgs

This chapter begins by considering the distinction between sex and gender. The latter constitutes the source of the social division between men and women considered as social beings. It serves as both a reflection of division and inequality and a source of difference and identity. The chapter then explores the framing of this division in terms of patriarchy and the inequalities that are organised by and structured within the relations of work and of social reproduction. It focuses next upon the consequences of such a division, first in terms of both financial assets and resources and then in terms of social relational capital, drawing upon Putnam’s distinction between bridging and bonding capital. It then considers other sources of difference that become more salient in later life, in terms of health illness and longevity. The chapter ends with the role of gender in representing later life, and the role of later life in representing gender. It concludes by distinguishing between gender as a structure shaping third age culture, and gender as a constituent in the social imaginary of the fourth age.



Family Law ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 364-460
Author(s):  
Joanna Miles ◽  
Rob George ◽  
Sonia Harris-Short

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter focuses on financial remedies on divorce. After outlining key socio-economic data about the family economy and its impact on family members (especially parents) on relationship breakdown, it discusses financial remedies on divorce; the principles governing the grant of those and exercise of the statutory discretion; the clean-break principle; private ordering; and reform.



Land Law ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben McFarlane ◽  
Nicholas Hopkins ◽  
Sarah Nield

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter discusses the internal regulation of co-ownership. It is concerned with the content question: the rights enjoyed by co-owners, including their rights and duties in relation to each other, and whether one co-owner can insist on a sale of the land against the wishes of another. The joint tenancy and the tenancy in common are two forms of co-ownership. The chapter explores the operation of survivorship in respect of a joint tenancy and the process through which a joint tenant may become a tenant in common through severance. Co-ownership is terminated once there is a sole legal and equitable owner. The process of partition can also terminate co-ownership. In both forms of co-ownership, the rights and duties of the co-owners are governed through the imposition of a trust of land, regulated by the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 (TOLATA 1996). TOLATA 1996 contains a procedure enabling disputes relating to land held on trust to be determined by an application to court. The chapter considers how the courts have resolved disputes between the beneficiaries as to whether land should be sold. The chapter also considers the relationship between TOLATA 1996 and ‘home rights’ (of occupation) conferred by the Family Law Act 1996.



Author(s):  
Rosemary L. Hopcroft

This chapter provides an overview of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society. Chapters in the first part of this book address the history of the use of method and theory from biology in the social sciences; the second part includes chapters on evolutionary approaches to social psychology; the third part includes chapters describing research on the interaction of genes (and other biochemicals such as hormones) and environmental contexts on a variety of outcomes of sociological interest; and the fourth part includes chapters that apply evolutionary theory to areas of traditional concern to sociologists—including the family, fertility, sex and gender, religion, crime, and race and ethnic relations. The last part of the book presents two chapters on cultural evolution.



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