This qualitative study explores the experiences of young people with professionals as they traverse the family court in Aotearoa-New Zealand. A hermeneutic phenomenological lens, based on the ...writings of Heidegger, Gadamer, van Manen and Buber, explored this phenomenon, which was embedded in the notion that young people need to have agency, the ability to act, to speak and to share their thoughts in matters that affect them. Six young people aged 8-16 years, four lawyers for the children, four specialist report writers (psychologists) and one parent were interviewed. Each interview was crafted into a story, which were then interpreted into "themes", to allow the young person's experiences to be better understood and presented. This article focuses on one aspect of the young person's experiences as reported by them. The key insight was that the professional who engages in extra-ordinary listening about the young person's experience of what matters to them, can build a space of trust, the "between", the gap between two people where mutual authenticity can exist, where discussion can occur, and where the professional can hear, respect and represent the young person's views at the decision-making phase of Court proceedings.
This article reviews the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights for litigants in person (LIPs). LIPs operate in a system that was not designed for them and ...so challenge the norm of fully represented parties that the system has evolved to expect, creating potential risks for their Article 6 rights. The jurisprudence on Article 6 reveals the centrality of effective participation as a requirement for fulfilling the right to a fair trial. The article views the jurisprudential interpretation against original and significant empirical research data on how LIPs participate in civil and family court processes. It applies a conceptual analysis of legal participation to consider what might constitute effective participation in court proceedings and, through the empirical evidence, categorizes the intellectual, practical, emotional, and attitudinal barriers that LIPs face in their legal proceedings, which can constitute risks to their rights under Article 6.
This Feature uses recent developments in LGBTQ-equality law to unsettle sex equality's enduring commitment to biology as a basis for sex discrimination. Sex equality rejects sex discrimination when ...it is based on sex stereotypes, defined as gross generalizations about women and men, but not when it is based on biological differences between the sexes, like pregnancy, anatomy, and strength. Biological justifications for race discrimination-once common-have been relegated to the trash heap of history. But biological justifications for sex discrimination persist. This is so because sex equality insists that biology alone is neither a stereotype nor an expression of bigotry. Biological rationales for sex discrimination remain attractive to lower federal and state courts, and have received the Supreme Court's blessing, most recently in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The result is a broad swath of laws across substantive areas-including family law, tort, immigration law, criminal law, property, and abortion law-that sustain sex inequality courtesy of biology and despite a fairly robust anti-stereotyping principle. This Feature argues that sex equality's continued embrace of real differences should not survive what LGBTQ equality shows: that biologically rationalized sex discrimination is an illegal sex stereotype. It uses recent developments in LGBTQ equality surrounding sex, the body, procreation, and parenthood to unsettle sex equality's beliefs in the reality of biological differences between the sexes and in the legality of laws based on those differences. It urges sex equality to grapple with what LGBTQ equality has to say about biology and its role in lawmaking and imagines what the American law of sex might look like when it does. Biologically rationalized sex distinctions have always been sex stereotypes. It is just that now, LGBTQ equality makes those stereotypes easier to see, harder to ignore, and impossible to justify.
Lesbian motherhood is an emerging practice among Chinese lesbian couples. Although this form of family-making might be appealing to Chinese lesbians who cannot legally marry their partners, lesbian ...mothers are subject to substantial risks and challenges arising from the lack of recognition by Chinese authorities and other family members. This study focuses on an anonymous lesbian's confession about her motherhood. It conducts a case analysis to investigate the incompatibility between transnational reproductive services and national household regulations and Marriage Law. This study analyses the persistence of patriarchy in a lesbian family, which suppresses women's agency both corporeally and in family roles. Through this analysis, this paper intends to explore lesbian mothers' vulnerabilities as they face a continuum of patriarchal exploitation in the absence of legal and social recognition. It also questions the radical challenge that lesbian motherhood is often assumed to make to male dominance and gendered norms.
This article considers the test used to determine the presence or absence of life in newborn babies, in relation to a widower's entitlement to remain in land brought to the marriage by his wife, as ...tenant by the curtesy of England. To qualify for curtesy, a widower needed to have produced a live and legitimate child, but, since even a short period of life was sufficient, there might be disputes as to whether a child which was now dead had ever been alive. The common law therefore had to develop a way of settling this difficult matter of confirming or denying the presence of life. Several thirteenth-century sources show an emphasis on a sound as an indicator of life. This article considers the use of a sound criterion in this area, arguing that thinking and practice surrounding the appropriate test were more complex, less settled, and more interesting than has been represented in somewhat perfunctory accounts in the work of later lawyers and legal historians. This is significant for the understanding of this area of medieval law, but also has broader implications within legal history and historiography, and for scholars from other fields such as medieval social and medical history.
This article uses Taiwan as an example to argue that reproductive justice for gay men should be conceptualised within social, legal, and political contexts. Taiwan is the first Asian country to ...legalise same‐sex marriage, yet the law favours heterosexual couples and denies LGBTQ+ reproductive rights. Thus, Taiwanese gay men seek third‐party reproduction overseas to become parents. This article exemplifies gay men's unequal conditions from a non‐Western perspective. I re‐examine scholarly literature on the interlocking concepts of reproductive justice, stratified reproduction, and queer reproduction to answer what reproductive justice gay men need and how their injustice position situates within and beyond the nation‐state borders. Drawing on the reproductive justice framework and studies of queer reproduction, this article proposes a transnational perspective to understand queer reproductive justice through the case that elucidates the specific context of Taiwanese gay men. This article aims to make two contributions. Firstly, it reconsiders the reproductive framework from a transnational perspective to argue that gay men's reproductive justice should be conceptualised at the intersection with other dimensions of injustice. Secondly, this article suggests that the transnational approach could be applied as a critical lens for future research in queer reproduction and reproductive justice.
A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy” refers to the phenomenon that family ...privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line.
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