John Eekelaar
Biographic Data
| ID | 188665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Eekelaar |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Eekelaar |
| SIGNATURE | EEKELAAR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Pembroke |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 100 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
International Survey of Family Law 2023
The International Society of Family Law is an independent, international, and non-political scholarly association dedicated to the study, research and discussion of family law and related disciplines. The Society's membership currently includes professors, lecturers, scholars, teachers, and researchers from more than 50 different countries, offering a unique opportunity for networking within a truly international family law community. The Interna…
Family Matters: Essays in Honour of John Eekelaar
John Eekelaar, FBA, is a 'giant of family law', whose unrivalled contribution to the entire breadth of family law scholarship and research has brought many doctrinal, theoretical, empirical and contextual insights to the study of family law and family justice. His world-wide reputation and influence in the field of family law, and the huge body of literature his career of more than 50 years has produced, are celebrated in this collection of essay…
Family Rights and Religion: The Library of Essays on Family Rights
Family Rights and Religion
The Law, Gender and Truth
The Law, Gender and Truth John Eekelaar John Eekelaar Emeritus Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Oxford ([email protected]). Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Human Rights Law Review, Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2020, Pages 797–809, https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngaa038 Published: 02 December 2020
Do Parents Know Best
While Article 5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to respect parents’ responsibilities to provide ‘appropriate’ direction and guidance to their children, Article 18 also proclaims that ‘the best interests of the child will be [the parents’] basic concern’. But how can this be done if, as is widely accepted, the “best interests” standard is too indeterminate safely to allow courts to substitute their assessment of chi…
Anne Barlow, Rosemary Hunter, Janet Smithson, and Jan Ewing: Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times
Access to justice
It comes to something when the Supreme Court has to explain, as a parent explains to a three-year-old child why people should behave when visiting friends, what the nature and purpose of law and th
Obligation & commitment in family law
In his insightful article, ‘Why Making Family Law is Hard’,1 Ira Ellman referred to private family law as a ‘body of law that operates in a sphere rich with non-legal obligations that people take s
Power
This chapter establishes the book’s intention to critique the exercise of power of family practices against the values of an open society. As a background to understanding modern forms of family governance, it outlines the ‘welfarism’ thesis which maintains that family governance has moved from an era of instrumentalism, through a welfarist phase, to an era of scepticism about institutional structures, and claims for individual empowerment where …
Respect
This chapter analyses the role of respect in personal law. Arguing that ‘respect’ means acknowledging that an entity has value in and of itself, it is maintained that if personal law is to be respectful of the individuals to whom it applies, it must recognize the value of the intimate. Examples are given where respect has not been shown, with reference to the law of nullity and divorce and the response of the law to homosexuality. The law must ac…
Responsibility
This chapter analyses the role of relationship responsibility in the law of divorce and parenthood, using a framework that distinguishes historical and prospective responsibility. The former is concerned with attributing blame, the latter with defining roles. For divorce, it argues there are strong reasons why the legal process should not seek to assess blame for marital breakdown. Prospective responsibility is recognized through property and fin…
Rethinking Parental Responsibility
One powerful impetus for the reform was the research of Ros Pickford. She discovered that unmarried fathers who were acting as fathers on a daily basis were surprised and angry, understandably, to discover that they did not have parental responsibility. Sometimes, having parental responsibility confers certain rights etc, but those rights could be held quite apart from it. In such cases, either having parental responsibility is sufficient, or bei…
Marriage and the Moral Bases of Personal Relationships
Marriage is a legal institution. Current debates about whether it should be extended beyond its traditional heterosexual constitution, and whether many of its legal incidents should apply to couples who live together without marrying, and about the introduction of civil partnership (modelled closely on marriage) for same-sex couples, make an examination of its contemporary role particularly timely. This article is about the interplay between the …
Family Law and Personal Life
Developments in the law, scholarship, and research since 2006 form a substantial part of the second edition of this book which sets the governance of personal relationships in the context of the exercise of social and personal power. Its central argument is that this power is counterbalanced by the presence of individual rights. This entails an analysis of the nature and deployment of rights, including human rights and children’s rights. Against …
International Conceptions of the Family
This article examines the evolving way the ‘family’ and ‘family life’ have been understood in international and regional human rights instruments, and in the case law of the relevant institutions. It shows how the various structural components which are considered to constitute those concepts operate both between relevant adults and between adults and children. But it also shows that important normative elements, in particular, anti-discriminatio…
Marriage Rites and Rights
During the 1960s, social norms relating to family breakdown diverged so sharply from the law of divorce that the law was forced to change radically. It is possible that something similar is now occ
Litigants in person – the struggle for justice
In December 2014 research for the Ministry of Justice (Trinder et al., 2014) identified a range of problems litigants in person (LIPs) faced in family proceedings, which would be aggravated after t
The Role of the Best Interests Principle in Decisions Affecting Children and Decisions about Children
The principle of the best interests of the child is firmly established and operates across a wide range of circumstances. The generally accepted view is that the principle demands decision makers to seek the best outcome for the children concerned, but that this has to be weighed against other interests. This leads to a very open-ended process. This article picks up on a distinction made, but not developed, between decisions about children and de…
Perceptions of Equality: The Road to Same-Sex Marriage in England and Wales
Managing family justice in diverse societies
The aim of this book is to explore what response the law has or should have to different family practices arising from cultural and religious beliefs. The issue has become increasingly debated as western countries have become more culturally diverse. Although discussion has frequently focused on the role Islamic family law should have in these countries, this book seeks to set that discussion within a wider context that includes consideration bot…
Then and now – family law's direction of travel
In order to convey vividly the difference between the assumptions and culture of family law litigation at the beginning of the 1960s and the present time, a random selection of reported cases at the earlier time are compared with a random selection reported at the later time. The result indicates that contemporary family law appears to be much more closely engaged with people's actual experiences and in seeking to resolve their problems than form…
Naturalism or Pragmatism? Towards an Expansive View of Human Rights
This article compares the naturalistic account of human rights in James Griffin's On Human Rights (2009) with the practical account by Charles R. Beitz in The Idea of Human Rights (2009). Taking Griffin's own examples, the analysis suggests that Griffin's account of human rights with regard to children, divorce, or marriage is unconvincing. However, while the practical approach is preferred, this leaves the basis for any universal duty to take st…
Not of the Highest Importance”: Family justice under threat
This paper takes issue with the “thin” view of family justice reflected in the terms of reference of the Family Justice Review and the government's Consultation Paper on legal aid of November 2011 which states that where cases arise from the litigants own decisions in their personal life that government is less likely to consider these cases concern issues of the highest importance
From Multiculturalism to Cultural Voluntarism: A Family‐based Approach
In the context of the current debate on multiculturalism, this article draws on three models of state policies towards families to propose a reframing of multiculturalist policies. They are the ‘authorisation’ model, wherein the state authorises families to define and enforce family obligations as law; the ‘delegation’ model, wherein the state prescribes the norms families are to follow and delegates to families the role of enforcing them; and th…
The Interests of the Child and the Child's Wishes: The Role of Dynamic Self-Determinism
The principal purpose of this paper is to explain how acting towards childern with the objective of furthering thier best interests may be reconciled with treating children as possessors of rights. The two bases for action require reconciliation if the argument is accepted that a right that another should have complete power to determine what is in A's interests and to diredt A accordingly leaves A without any rights at all. The paper argues that…
Parental responsibility: State of nature or nature of the state
Parental responsibility” is a central concept in the Children Act 1989. The expression can represent two ideas: one, that parents must behave dutifully towards their children; the other, that responsibility for child care belongs to parents, not the state. This article shows how the second idea came to replace the first as the dominant conception during the development of the legislation. It is further argued that parental responsibility in the s…
Marriage and the Moral Bases of Personal Relationships
Marriage is a legal institution. Current debates about whether it should be extended beyond its traditional heterosexual constitution, and whether many of its legal incidents should apply to couples who live together without marrying, and about the introduction of civil partnership (modelled closely on marriage) for same‐sex couples, make an examination of its contemporary role particularly timely. This article is about the interplay between the …
Children Between Cultures
Research into issues of inter-cultural conflict has paid relatively little attention to the position of children who find themselves caught up in such circumstances. When courts have needed to make decisions about individual children in this context, they have found it difficult to adopt a consistent and principled approach. This article examines the kinds of contexts in which some problems have arisen, and puts forward a framework, rooted in lib…
The Role of the Best Interests Principle in Decisions Affecting Children and Decisions about Children
The principle of the best interests of the child is firmly established and operates across a wide range of circumstances. The generally accepted view is that the principle demands decision makers to seek the best outcome for the children concerned, but that this has to be weighed against other interests. This leads to a very open-ended process. This article picks up on a distinction made, but not developed, between decisions about children and de…
Perceptions of Equality: The Road to Same-Sex Marriage in England and Wales
International Conceptions of the Family
This article examines the evolving way the ‘family’ and ‘family life’ have been understood in international and regional human rights instruments, and in the case law of the relevant institutions. It shows how the various structural components which are considered to constitute those concepts operate both between relevant adults and between adults and children. But it also shows that important normative elements, in particular, anti-discriminatio…
Not of the Highest Importance”: Family justice under threat
This paper takes issue with the “thin” view of family justice reflected in the terms of reference of the Family Justice Review and the government's Consultation Paper on legal aid of November 2011 which states that where cases arise from the litigants own decisions in their personal life that government is less likely to consider these cases concern issues of the highest importance
From Multiculturalism to Cultural Voluntarism: A Family‐based Approach
In the context of the current debate on multiculturalism, this article draws on three models of state policies towards families to propose a reframing of multiculturalist policies. They are the ‘authorisation’ model, wherein the state authorises families to define and enforce family obligations as law; the ‘delegation’ model, wherein the state prescribes the norms families are to follow and delegates to families the role of enforcing them; and th…
The Importance of Thinking That Children Have Rights
In declaring that children have rights, the United Nations may have been unaware that philosophers and jurists have differed among themselves over the basis for conceiving that children may have rights. It is suggested in this paper that the problem is compounded by the practice of framing policy towards children in the form of general duties to promote their welfare. It is argued that legal relationships of this kind exclude the essential featur…
Families and The State: An Historical Perspective on the Public Regulation of Private Conduct
This paper examines the history of the debate between advocates of the regulation and the deregulation of family life through a case study of English social policy for children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It introduces the generational order as an issue worthy of consideration alongside that of the gender order. It considers the nature of the relationship between private and public spheres of social action and questions the adequac…
The End of an Era
An examination of the development of family law in the United States and England in the last half of the twentieth century showed that the form of family law of the 1950s was closer to the 1890s than to that of the 1990s. This change mirrored the demographic revolution of the late twentieth century. This article argues that it may also have begun to bring to a close an approach taken by legal institutions to family relationships dubbed welfarism …
Childhood as a Social Problem: A Survey of the History of Legal Regulation
The state's regulation of parents' care of their children is currently a subject of some controversy in England. Drafters and enforcers of statutes are caught between contradictory demands: for the extension of intervention in the interests of children mistreated by their parents and for the deregulation of family life in the interests of parental liberty. As we have argued elsewhere, this is, in certain respects, a false antithesis.' Nevertheles…
The Place of Divorce in Family Law's New Role
Do Parents Know Best
While Article 5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to respect parents’ responsibilities to provide ‘appropriate’ direction and guidance to their children, Article 18 also proclaims that ‘the best interests of the child will be [the parents’] basic concern’. But how can this be done if, as is widely accepted, the “best interests” standard is too indeterminate safely to allow courts to substitute their assessment of chi…
Access to justice
It comes to something when the Supreme Court has to explain, as a parent explains to a three-year-old child why people should behave when visiting friends, what the nature and purpose of law and th
Marriage Rites and Rights
During the 1960s, social norms relating to family breakdown diverged so sharply from the law of divorce that the law was forced to change radically. It is possible that something similar is now occ
Then and now – family law's direction of travel
In order to convey vividly the difference between the assumptions and culture of family law litigation at the beginning of the 1960s and the present time, a random selection of reported cases at the earlier time are compared with a random selection reported at the later time. The result indicates that contemporary family law appears to be much more closely engaged with people's actual experiences and in seeking to resolve their problems than form…
Naturalism or Pragmatism? Towards an Expansive View of Human Rights
This article compares the naturalistic account of human rights in James Griffin's On Human Rights (2009) with the practical account by Charles R. Beitz in The Idea of Human Rights (2009). Taking Griffin's own examples, the analysis suggests that Griffin's account of human rights with regard to children, divorce, or marriage is unconvincing. However, while the practical approach is preferred, this leaves the basis for any universal duty to take st…
The Significance of Marriage: Contrasts between White British and Ethnic Minority Groups in England
It is widely believed that the institution of marriage enhances communal wellbeing, and governments in the United States and the United Kingdom have expressly adopted policies designed to “promote” marriage. These policies, however, are little informed by evidence about how people who marry are using the institution, or how entering or not entering marriage affects people's ideas about the rights and obligations they owe within intimate partnersh…
Parenthood in Modern Society: Legal and Social Issues for the Twenty-First Century
The Chief Glory: The Export of Children from the United Kingdom
Lord Shaftesbury dwelt on the problem of sexual imbalance in the colony, and proposed that girls should be sent out 'before the age to which the least suspicion (of sexual experience) could attach' and suggested they might go to a small industrial school in the colony in order to fit them 'by an education of not less than a year to become useful servants and eligible wives'. The Earl of Desart had only one observation
A Jurisdiction in Search of a Mission: Family Proceedings in England and Wales
Family Law and Social Problems
Rhodesia: The Abdication Of Constitutionalism
Rhodesia: Constitution Making and Politics
Journal Article RHODESIA: CONSTITUTION MAKING AND POLITICS Get access J. M. Eekelaar J. M. Eekelaar Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 20, Issue 2, December 1966, Pages 120–135, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a051394 Published: 01 December 1966
Splitting the Grundnorm
Rhodesia and Independence
Rhodesia: The Abdication Of Constitutionalism
Reports Of Committees
The Place of Divorce in Family Law's New Role
Children in Care and the Children Act 1975
Family Law and Social Policy
International Child Abduction by Parents
Marriage and Cohabitation in Contemporary Societies: Areas of Legal, Social and Ethical Change
Journal Article Marriage and Cohabitation in Contemporary Societies: Areas of Legal, Social and Ethical Change Get access Marriage and Cohabitation in Contemporary Societies: Areas of Legal, Social and Ethical Change. Edited by John M. Eekelaar and Sanford Katz.Toronto: Butterworths, 1980. Pp. 454. Grace Ganz Blumberg Grace Ganz Blumberg *Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Acad…
Marriage and Cohabitation in Contemporary Societies: Areas of Legal, Social and Ethical Change: An International and Interdisciplinary Study
These are the proceedings of the Third World Conference of the International Society on Family Law held in Uppsala Sweden June 5-9 1979. The 43 papers are grouped under five substantive subject headings one of which is concerned with demographic and social aspects of marriage and cohabitation. This section contains papers on family formation in Europe and on cohabitation in Sweden. (ANNOTATION)
Childhood, Welfare and Justice (Book)
Parents and Children: Rights, Responsibilities and Needs
Childhood as a Social Problem: A Survey of the History of Legal Regulation
The state's regulation of parents' care of their children is currently a subject of some controversy in England. Drafters and enforcers of statutes are caught between contradictory demands: for the extension of intervention in the interests of children mistreated by their parents and for the deregulation of family life in the interests of parental liberty. As we have argued elsewhere, this is, in certain respects, a false antithesis.' Nevertheles…
Family Law and Social Problems
The Protection of Children: State Intervention and Family Life
This book is based on the most extensive investigation of child abuse and neglect ever carried out in Great Britain. The author followed the course of numerous cases from the first detection of ill-treatment to the resolution (or otherwise) of the problem
The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America
Equality and the Purpose of Maintenance
In 1959 Wolfram Miiller-Freienfels wrote that realisation of the equality of men and women is one of the most characteristic aspects of contemporary life.1 He substantiated this observation by reference to a battery of legislation passed between 1946 and 1958 in a variety of countries as diverse as Yugoslavia and Japan, Israel and the Philippines, Uruguay and Belgium, which sought to give legal effect to the principle of equality between the sexe…
Families and The State: An Historical Perspective on the Public Regulation of Private Conduct
This paper examines the history of the debate between advocates of the regulation and the deregulation of family life through a case study of English social policy for children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It introduces the generational order as an issue worthy of consideration alongside that of the gender order. It considers the nature of the relationship between private and public spheres of social action and questions the adequac…
Parental responsibility: State of nature or nature of the state
Parental responsibility” is a central concept in the Children Act 1989. The expression can represent two ideas: one, that parents must behave dutifully towards their children; the other, that responsibility for child care belongs to parents, not the state. This article shows how the second idea came to replace the first as the dominant conception during the development of the legislation. It is further argued that parental responsibility in the s…
The Importance of Thinking That Children Have Rights
In declaring that children have rights, the United Nations may have been unaware that philosophers and jurists have differed among themselves over the basis for conceiving that children may have rights. It is suggested in this paper that the problem is compounded by the practice of framing policy towards children in the form of general duties to promote their welfare. It is argued that legal relationships of this kind exclude the essential featur…
Old and at home: The legal framework, policy imperatives and individual choices which affect the way people manage their property after retirement
The elderly population is increasing in diversity of needs and resources. There is a social policy imperative to encourage use of equity in the home to fund care, legal and financial frameworks to facilitate this, but little take up. This paper reports a small empirical study, carried out by the Oxford Socio-Legal Centre with support from the Nuffield Foundation of the individual decisions made by older home owners in managing their property afte…
Child Support: The British Solution
In April 1993 a child support scheme was introduced throughout the United Kingdom. Important features of the scheme were influenced by approaches to child support taken in other countries, but the scheme incorporated some distinctive elements of its own. This article puts the development of the British scheme within the political and social context in which it was nurtured, explains its central features, and draws attention to underlying themes w…
Regulating Divorce
The Interests of the Child and the Child's Wishes: The Role of Dynamic Self-Determinism
The principal purpose of this paper is to explain how acting towards childern with the objective of furthering thier best interests may be reconciled with treating children as possessors of rights. The two bases for action require reconciliation if the argument is accepted that a right that another should have complete power to determine what is in A's interests and to diredt A accordingly leaves A without any rights at all. The paper argues that…
Political science (52 works) · Sociology (47 works) · Law (41 works) · Law (27 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies (20 works) · Law and economics (18 works) · Family law (15 works) · Conflict of Laws and Jurisdiction (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works)