Cross Currents: Family Law and Policy in the US and England

This unique contribution to comparative family law brings together dedicated essays on a comprehensive range of issues in family law in the United States and England showing how they stand at the beginning of the new century and how they reached there. This provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine how family law has reacted to a period of change in family life widely held to be without precedent. The legal analyses are set within critical accounts of wider social and family policy and against a fully explored demographic background provided by leading scholars in these areas. Readers will be challenged to understand the nature of family law and its possible future direction.

A. BACKGROUND TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ; 1. How to Give the Present a Past: Family Law in the United States: 1950-2000 ; 2. Changing Family Patterns in England and wales Over the Past Fifty Years ; 3. Century of the American Family ; 4. Family Policy in the Post-War Period ; 5. The Evolution of Family Policy in the United States after the Second World War ; 6. English Family Law Since The Second World War ; B. ESTABLISHING THE FAMILY ; 7. The Shadowlands: The Regulation of Human Reproduction in the United States ; 8. The Legal Regulation of Infertility Treatment in Britain ; 9. Parenthood in the United States ; 10. Marriage, Cohabitation, and Parenthood: From Contract to Status? ; 11. Marriage: An Institution in Transition and Redefinition ; 12. The Constitutionalization of American Family Law: The Case of the Right to Marry ; 13. Dual Systems of Adoption in the United States ; 14. English Adoption Law: Past, Present, and Future ; C. REGULATING AND REORGANIZING THE FAMILY ; 15. Divorce in the United States ; 16. Divorce in England 1950-2000: A Moral Tale ; 17. The Finacial Incidents of family Dissolution ; 18. Post-Divorce Financial Obligations ; 19. The Status of Children: A Story of Emerging Rights ; 20. Disputing Children ; 21. The Law and Violence Against Women in the Family at Century's End: The American Experience ; 22. Violence Against Women in the family ; D. THE FAMILY AND GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES ; 23. A Forum for Every Fuss: The Growth of Court Services and ADR Treatments for Family Law Cases in the United States ; 24. Access to Justice for Families in Post-War Britain ; 25. Child Wefare Policy and Practice in the United States from 1950 to 2000 ; 26. From Curtis to Waterhouse: State Care and Child Protection in the UK 1945-2000 ; 27. The Hague Children's Conventions: The Internationalization of Child Law ; E. EPILOGUES ; 28. Individual Rights and Family Relationships ; 29. The End of an Era?