Search Results

Carers

Jonathan Herring

in Older People in Law and Society

Older people can be involved in care work, either as the givers of care, or as the recipients of it. This chapter looks at the rights and responsibilities of those carers. It demonstrates the ways in ... More

Older people can be involved in care work, either as the givers of care, or as the recipients of it. This chapter looks at the rights and responsibilities of those carers. It demonstrates the ways in which carers have been ignored by the law and the relatively little social or legal recognition given to carers. It considers how better to promote the interests of carers and how to balance their interests with those they are caring for. The chapter considers the support available to carers from local authorities and the government's attempts to improve the services available.Less

Two Governments, One State: Recognition Contests and the Use of Force

Brad R. Roth

in Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law

This chapter examines the relationship between U.N. delegation credentials and legal recognition, summarizing the substance of the major collective recognition controversies that have occurred in the ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between U.N. delegation credentials and legal recognition, summarizing the substance of the major collective recognition controversies that have occurred in the course of the U.N. era. It also discusses controversies over delegation credentials and over ‘invitations’ of foreign military armed resistance. It also describes cases in Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama, where the debate focused on the internal character of the incumbent regime, thereby bringing the competing considerations involved in establishing criteria for legal recognition.Less

Legal Integrity and Recognition

Elaine Chase and Jennifer Allsopp

in Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing: Stories of Life in Transition

This chapter examines the centrality of legal status as a building block for security and constructing a future in Europe. It engages with the realities of living with or without legal recognition in ... More

This chapter examines the centrality of legal status as a building block for security and constructing a future in Europe. It engages with the realities of living with or without legal recognition in England and Italy and the impact this has on young people. The chapter considers these experiences within international and national frameworks of young people's rights and 'best interests'. It also looks at the serendipitous ways in which access to such rights are in fact socially constructed. As the chapter highlights, the arbitrary allocation of papers generates an inequitable set of life opportunities, or capabilities, as unaccompanied migrant young people become adults within the constraints of immigration control.Less

Spousal Secrets: Same-Sex Couples and the Functional Approach to Spousal Evidentiary Privileges

Edward Stein

in The Secrets of Law

This chapter considers the arguments for spousal secrets in the context of the current revolution in family law regarding legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It analyzes different approaches ... More

This chapter considers the arguments for spousal secrets in the context of the current revolution in family law regarding legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It analyzes different approaches for dealing with the legal status of spousal secrets at this revolutionary moment and offers a sophisticated version of functionalism as a viable approach to spousal secrets.Less

Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law

Christian Lund

in Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia

This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” suggests that property rights are not merely about legal rights, but, ... More

This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” suggests that property rights are not merely about legal rights, but, more importantly, about social relations and the political and physical capacity to hold things of value: land, in particular. For many people in Indonesia, rights remain a faint promise, and justice a mere rumor. Land conflicts and dispossession have placed unjust burdens on ordinary people for generations and under different regimes. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The chapter explains that the book is therefore about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them. It is about the relationship between legal recognition and possession.Less

In Defense of an Impure Transgender Politics

Isaac West

in Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

This concluding chapter focuses on a cover story from the New Republic that declared transgender rights to be the next great civil rights issue. A close reading of the cover image and the ... More

This concluding chapter focuses on a cover story from the New Republic that declared transgender rights to be the next great civil rights issue. A close reading of the cover image and the accompanying story allows one to engage the limits of left legalism—the practice of articulating “broad-based, locally, and culturally rich movement politics to demands for state-enforced rights.” It translates “wide-ranging political questions into more narrowly framed legal questions” and prematurely foreclosing the possibilities for “open-ended discursive contestation.” The remainder of the chapter discusses concepts connected to citizenship, including agency, recognition, and norms. For instance, when citizenship is viewed as performatively produced relationalities among families, friends, and strangers, legal recognition is transformed as it is practiced.Less

Negotiating (with) Strangers

Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey

in Law and the Stranger

This book examines the ambiguous place occupied by strangers in communities not their own and how law, particularly liberal legal regimes, identifies and responds to strangers within and across their ... More

This book examines the ambiguous place occupied by strangers in communities not their own and how law, particularly liberal legal regimes, identifies and responds to strangers within and across their borders. It analyzes sites of encounter and estrangement within and across the borders of nation-states as well as the place of “strangers” in the delicately ambiguous space in which legal recognition and the rendering of hospitality is negotiated. The book also explores how liberal states have conferred, and should confer, recognition on those who knock on the door and ask for entry, along with the complications that arise when those perceived as strangers are inside the polity rather than outside supplicants. It argues that by extending hospitality and bestowing recognition to strangers according to conditions created by law, strangers are made through law and not born through accidents of geography. Finally, the book considers how the legal recognition of a stranger constitutes both stranger and self.Less

Temporary Marriage

Daniel Nolan

in After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships

Parties to a temporary marriage, in the sense discussed in this chapter, agree in advance that their marriage will only last for a fixed period of time unless renewed: that it will automatically ... More

Parties to a temporary marriage, in the sense discussed in this chapter, agree in advance that their marriage will only last for a fixed period of time unless renewed: that it will automatically expire after two years, for instance, or five, or twenty. This chapter defends the claim that temporary marriages deserve state recognition. The main argument for this is an application of a principle of marriage equality. Some other arguments for are also canvassed, and a number of arguments against recognition are also discussed. The chapter also discusses the question of whether such “temporary marriages” are in fact a kind of marriage, and defends the claim that they are, or would be, genuinely marriages.Less

Regulating for Connection

Naomi Cahn

in The New Kinship: Constructing Donor-Conceived Families

Most donor-conceived people are interested in learning more about the donor and any half-siblings who were conceived through use of the same donor. There are numerous issues as well as potential ... More

Most donor-conceived people are interested in learning more about the donor and any half-siblings who were conceived through use of the same donor. There are numerous issues as well as potential approaches to the question of how to promote these connections. This chapter discusses two different types of solutions: one set of proposals facilitates donor-conceived families finding each other; and a second concerns legal links, or the possibility of more formal legal recognition, between families through, for example, expansion of coverage of family and medical leave laws. These new forms of regulation are part of the paradigm shift away from viewing donor-conceived families and their communities as scientific and medical constructs and instead viewing them as relational entities.Less

8 Regulating for Connection

Naomi Cahn

in The New Kinship: Constructing Donor-Conceived Families

Most donor-conceived people are interested in learning more about the donor and any half-siblings who were conceived through use of the same donor. There are numerous issues as well as potential ... More

Most donor-conceived people are interested in learning more about the donor and any half-siblings who were conceived through use of the same donor. There are numerous issues as well as potential approaches to the question of how to promote these connections. This chapter discusses two different types of solutions: one set of proposals facilitates donor-conceived families finding each other; and a second concerns legal links, or the possibility of more formal legal recognition, between families through, for example, expansion of coverage of family and medical leave laws. These new forms of regulation are part of the paradigm shift away from viewing donor-conceived families and their communities as scientific and medical constructs and instead viewing them as relational entities. Less

(Re)producing Trans Families: Accessing Social, Legal, and Medical Recognition and Technologies

Carla A. Pfeffer

in Queering Families: The Postmodern Partnerships of Cisgender Women and Transgender Men

This chapter considers what it means for cis women and their trans men partners to form “queer” partnerships and families in the 21st century. Specifically, this chapter discusses choices and ... More

This chapter considers what it means for cis women and their trans men partners to form “queer” partnerships and families in the 21st century. Specifically, this chapter discusses choices and negotiations around marriage, monogamy, and parenthood. This chapter introduces the concepts of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to theorize the structurally bounded choices that cis women and their trans men navigate and negotiate on a daily basis. These negotiations expose broader sociolegal tensions and dilemmas about what it means to be husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers in the 21st century. For example, postmodern assisted reproductive technologies make it increasingly possible to form families and connections to offspring in ways that were previously only imagined. Despite these rapid technological shifts, financial access to these technologies and cultural lags in accepting diverse family forms have been less quick to evolve.Less

Why Discriminate?

in The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law

This chapter discusses the moral arguments that have been offered for and against unequal treatment of gays. The importance of the idea that marriage is inherently heterosexual was recently shown ... More

This chapter discusses the moral arguments that have been offered for and against unequal treatment of gays. The importance of the idea that marriage is inherently heterosexual was recently shown dramatically in a series of cases in which state courts attempted to mandate legal recognition of same-sex couples. In Hawaii and Alaska, judicial decisions that seemed likely to require recognition of same-sex marriages prompted amendments to those states' constitutions that passed by overwhelming margins. In Vermont, however, a decision that offered gays exactly the same benefits, but not the honorific “marriage,” not only did not produce any such amendment but was met with prompt cooperation by the state legislature. Evidently, many Americans share the intuition that marriage is inherently heterosexual, and that intuition plays a powerful role in determining the changing legal status of gays.Less

Introduction

Orsolya Toth

in The Lex Mercatoria in Theory and Practice

The Introduction describes the stages of the analysis and the methodology adopted in the book. It argues that the lex mercatoria debate is currently incoherent because proponents suggest that the lex ... More

The Introduction describes the stages of the analysis and the methodology adopted in the book. It argues that the lex mercatoria debate is currently incoherent because proponents suggest that the lex mercatoria factually exists, whereas opponents submit that it is not legally recognized. A coherent discussion must take into account both the factual existence and the legal recognition of the lex mercatoria. The analysis in the book proceeds in four stages. First, it evaluates the existing accounts of the lex mercatoria and selects the most promising concept. Second, it develops the framework and central categories of the proposed account. Third, it opens up the discourse to public international law and jurisprudence. Fourth, it examines practical issues of choosing the lex mercatoria as the governing law and the proof of a lex mercatoria rule. The Introduction argues that a paradigm-shift is necessary to grasp the lex mercatoria as ‘a-national law’.Less