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This chapter opens with a discussion of the 2010 Oklahoma Referendum which vividly demonstrates public fears and misapprehensions about “shari’a law.” One such misapprehension is the belief (unsupported by evidence) that North American Muslims wish to establish shari’a as an alternate legal system. In contrast, this study suggests that Muslims understand their recourse to traditional processes such as Islamic marriage and divorce as an aspect of their private lives. The courts do not recognize Islamic marriage and divorce, refusing (in most cases) to enforce a promise by a husband to pay mahr contained in an Islamic marriage contract. At the same time, the courts (under the principle of “comity”) may recognize an Islamic marriage or divorce carried out in a Muslim country, even when it appears to be a sham to avoid obligations due in North America. There is clear evidence that North American Muslims use the courts in divorce matters (see chapter seven). Respondents saw no dissonance between their identity as Muslims and their citizen’s right to bring contentious matters to the courts. A very small number resisted either paying or receiving money under a court order because they felt this compromised their beliefs. Many more complained that the courts did not understand or respect Muslims.

This introductory chapter discusses the developments in family law during the last half of the 20th century. It highlights milestones such as the American Bar Association's recognition of family law practice and scholarship in 1958, promulgation of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act in 1970, and the development of the Model Mandatory Child Abuse Reporting Act. It also discusses some challenges faced by established principles in family law in the 21st century. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

The process of culmination of the debate in the political sphere tracing the developments relating to the Hindu Code Bill during 1952 to 1956 is dealt with in this chapter of the book. This phase marks the final passage of the Bill in the form of five enactments spanning over the period 1952 to 1956. The account of the discourse over the Bill presents the tensions and undercurrents of a society in transition and the conflict between tradition and modernity.

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

This chapter begins by examining the partnership metaphor that inspired the no-fault reforms almost forty years ago. It argues that no-fault divorce laws fail to recognize both the common case in which partnership business continues after the dissociation of a partner and the critical distinction between dissolution, windup, and termination. The remedy is not to scrap partnership, but to expand it; not to abandon the powerful, egalitarian, gender-neutral principles that drew no-fault reformers in the first place, but to enrich our understanding of those principles. The chapter then advances an enriched partnership model that analogizes alimony to a buyout. An analogy to partnership buyouts provides a conceptual rationale for alimony lacking in current law, and an explanation for the common intuition that alimony should depend on marriage duration and spousal earning disparities. The buyout analogy does all this in an egalitarian, gender-neutral framework that casts caregivers as equal stakeholders in marriage rather than victims of marriage.

This chapter begins by examining the partnership metaphor that inspired the no-fault reforms almost forty years ago. It argues that no-fault divorce laws fail to recognize both the common case in which partnership business continues after the dissociation of a partner and the critical distinction between dissolution, windup, and termination. The remedy is not to scrap partnership, but to expand it; not to abandon the powerful, egalitarian, gender-neutral principles that drew no-fault reformers in the first place, but to enrich our understanding of those principles. The chapter then advances an enriched partnership model that analogizes alimony to a buyout. An analogy to partnership buyouts provides a conceptual rationale for alimony lacking in current law, and an explanation for the common intuition that alimony should depend on marriage duration and spousal earning disparities. The buyout analogy does all this in an egalitarian, gender-neutral framework that casts caregivers as equal stakeholders in marriage rather than victims of marriage.

This chapter argues that Thomas Hardy's novel of rural life, The Woodlanders, locates the effects of late Victorian state fantasy in the hinterlands of the nation, denaturalizing a process that was becoming everyday in the metropolitan spaces of England. Here characters dream of a new law that will release them from the bonds of marriage and even erase the past. Hardy attends pointedly to the vagaries of love and pity among characters and on the part of readers for characters. In light of historical shifts in the political imaginary of the 1880s and 1890s, we can read such moments as meditations on the relations between a benevolent, sympathetic state and its subjects. Ultimately, while The Woodlanders seems to foster sympathy for how rural folk get caught up in state fantasy, it ultimately indicts this social feeling and, by extension, the emergent modern welfare state, which was appropriating it. Through the flows of feeling and projections that it describes and induces, The Woodlanders exposes how the practice of sympathy is founded on distance, deferral, and moral judgment, thus complicating attempts to receive or mobilize it on either an individual or governmental scale.

Chapter 6 provides concrete cases in criminal and civil justice to flesh out the effects and defects of the reforms during the Republic (1912–1949). For criminal justice, it looks into how robbers and bandits were punished under a special law reminiscent of the imperial-era precedents and how Chinese collaborators working for the Japanese occupiers during the war (1937–1945) were prosecuted and punished after the war (1946–1949). For civil justice, the chapter focuses on marriage and divorce and the issue of concubines, showing the movement toward gender and marital equality and the agency of women in pushing for such changes and in using the law and courts to pursue their own interests.

During the second half of the twentieth century, a seismic shift in outlook, norms, behaviours, and laws transformed Western societies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender relations. These changes were characterized and facilitated by escalating rejection of dominant sources of moral authority, including organized religion. This chapter considers the Church of Scotland’s response to the ‘permissive society’. It attempted to grapple theologically with questions concerning marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, confronted unavoidably with profound questions concerning gender, power, and sexuality. These debates generated controversy and division as the moral consensus fractured. Fault lines opened up between conservatives who defended the validity of Christian moral certainties, and others who embraced more liberal and contextual interpretations of Scripture and tradition. Previously silenced or subordinated voices emerged, challenging but failing to provoke radical institutional change at a time of rapid declension in the status and cultural influence of the national Church.

This chapter presents the stormy beginnings of the Israeli state. On May 14, 1948, just a few hours before the end of the British Mandate over Palestine, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The declaration was followed by invasion of the armies of Arab states surrounding Israel and despite its victories in the War of Independence, peace eluded the nation. The Provisional Council of State established the principle of legal continuity with British rule, as Israeli law culture has borrowed many of its basic principles from the British model. Jewish law, which was not consistent with the fundamental democratic principles on which the state had been founded, was therefore not adopted. However, Rabbinical Courts are granted exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce in the Jewish community while Muslim, Druze, and Christian marriage and divorce are controlled by the state-sponsored religious courts of their respective communities.