Changing Contours of Domestic Life, Family and Law

Caring and Sharing

Anne Bottomley, Simone Wong

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781847315366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

Drawing from a wide range of material and socio-legal methods, this collection brings together original essays, written by internationally renowned scholars, investigating emerging patterns in the shape and form of the legal regulation of domestic relations. Taking as a focus the theme of 'caring and sharing', the collection includes chapters which reflect on the changing contours of what we think of as 'domestic relations'; the impact which legal recognition carries in making visible some relationships rather than others; the potential for normative values carried within patterns of legal recognition and regulation; intersections between private law and public policy; the role of private law in the allocation of responsibility and privilege; the differential impact of seemingly progressive policies on economically vulnerable or socially marginal groupings; tensions between family law models and models carried within other fields of private law; and, unusually, architectures in law and the built environment designed to facilitate broader accounts of domestic relationships. This thoughtful, provocative and wide-ranging collection will be a must for anyone, whatever their discipline background, interested in the insights and potential offered by a fresh engagement with the complexity of domestic relations and the law.
Authors: Anne Barlow, Anne Bottomley, Susan Boyd and Cindy Baldassi, Alison Diduck, Susan Scott-Hunt, Nan Seuffert, Carol Smart, Simone Wong and Claire Young.

Table of contents

• Prelims
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction Changing Contours of Domestic Life, Family and Law: Caring and Sharing
• 2 Making Kin: Relationality and Law
• Part I Property Division in Couple Relationships
• 3 Property and Couple Relationships: What Does Community of Property Have to Offer English Law?
• 4 Caring and Sharing: Interdependency as a Basis for Property Redistribution?
• Part II What is Fair and to Whom?
• 5 Relationship Fairness
• 6 Taking Spousal Status into Account for Tax Purposes: The Pitfalls and Penalties
• Part III Heteronormativity and Marriage Fundamentalism
• 7 Marriage or Naught? Marriage and Unmarried Cohabitation in Canada
• 8 Same-Sex Immigration: Domestication and Homonormativity
• Part IV Pushing at the Contours of Domestic Relationships
• 9 ‘They shall be simple in their homes . . .’: The Many Dimensions of the Idea and Practices of Co-operative Housing
• 10 Intentional Communities and Care-giving: Co-Housing Possibilities
• Bibliography
• Index