The State of Families: Law, Policy, and the Meanings of Relationships collects essential readings on the family to examine the multiple forms of contemporary families, the many issues facing families, the policies that regulate families, and how families—and family life—have become politicized. This text explores various dimensions of "the family" and uses a critical approach to understand the historical, cultural, and political constructions of the family. Each section takes different aspects of the family to highlight the intersection of individual experience, structures of inequality—including race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration—and state power. Readings, both original and reprinted from a wide range of experts in the field, show the multiple forms and meanings of family by delving into topics including the traditional ground of motherhood, childhood, and marriage, while also exploring cutting edge research into fatherhood, reproduction, child-free families, and welfare. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the family, The State of Families offers students in the social sciences and professionals working with families new ways to identify how social structure and institutional practice shape individual experience.

Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short history of the complexities of family law and family life--including the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing.

Writer and columnist Benjamin Law revisits his joyous and much-loved family memoir, spilling the tea on his family's latest antics The book that inspired the major SBS television series! Meet the Law family – eccentric, endearing and hard to resist. Your guide is Benjamin, the third of five children and a born humourist. Join him as he tries to answer some puzzling questions. Why won't his Chinese dad wear made-in-China underpants? Why was most of his extended family deported in the 1980s? Will his childhood dreams of Home and Away stardom come to nothing? What are his chances of finding love? In this updated edition with a new chapter, Benjamin Law fills us in on his family's antics from the past decade. ‘Benjamin Law manages to be scatagogical, hilarious and heartbreaking all at the same time. Every sentence fizzes like an exploding fireball of energy.’—Alice Pung ‘A vivid, gorgeously garish, Technicolour portrait of a family. It's impossible not to let oneself go along for the ride and emerge at the book's end enlightened, touched, thrilling with laughter.’—Marieke Hardy ‘The eccentric, clever and beautifully resonant The Family Law. It's sharply written, brilliantly observed and infused with an authenticity that makes it compelling.’ —Saturday Age ‘Very funny...you may find yourself at times almost barking with laughter’ —The Monthly ‘Law is a writer of great wit and warmth who combines apparently artless and effortless comedian's patter with a high level of technical skill.’ —Sydney Morning Herald ‘Simultaneously weird and instantly recognisable, the Laws are an Australian family it's well worth getting to know’ —The Enthusiast ‘Wonderful. Everyone should run to their nearest bookshop and buy a copy.’ —Defamer ‘An addictive read.’ —Courier-Mail

The second edition of this casebook has been updated and trimmed, although it retains a wide range of topics and materials. It covers a variety of private international law issues, including child abduction, child custody, adoption, child support enforcement, and recognition of marriages and divorces. The book also explores the impact of public international law on both domestic and international regulation of the family, using topics such as family violence and the rights of the child. Finally, the book uses comparative law materials to examine traditional family law topics, such as the regulation of marriage, the rights of same-sex couples, adoption, reproductive freedom, and more.

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.

The paradigm of family has shifted rapidly and dramatically, from nuclear unit to diverse constellations of intimacy. At the same time, some norms resist change, such as women’s continuing role as primary care providers despite their increased uptake of paid work. This tension between transformation and stasis in family arrangements has an impact on economic, emotional, and legal aspects of daily life. House Rules critically explores the intertwining of norms and laws that govern familial relationships. This incisive collection provides tools to analyze those difficulties and, ultimately, to design laws to better respond to ongoing change and avoid entrenching inequalities.