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This chapter estimates the movement within family laws from the sacramental premises of ‘love and honour’, ‘obedience and subservience’, and ‘duties and obligations’, to modern frames of ‘rights and entitlements’. The various nuances and the ordeal of accessing justice are dealt. It then covers the right to matrimonial property. The right to reside in the matrimonial home and the right to a financial settlement at the termination of marriage are the two distinct rights which are underlying the marriage contract. It is noted that women will choose to leave economic advantages during divorce settlements to obtain sole custody of their children. The connections between a woman’s claim of child custody and the dependency it produces while evolving a framework for property division poses a challenge to the equality model of marriage as partnership.

Both in the law of property and the law of succession Scots law has historically contained rules discriminating against women, restricting their rights and limiting their control over property and its disposal. These rules may sometimes have had a historical justification based on the place accorded to women in society but they could not be maintained. Some change took place by private initiative limiting the general rules but equality has required a long process of legislative change. Formal equality, however, does not ensure actual equality in that equal access to property and hence to control over it is also required.

This chapter explores the changes since the 1960s in Hindu law, which increased divorce rights and the rights of daughters in family joint property, and in commonly applicable matrimonial laws, which strengthened alimony entitlements and support for women and children facing domestic violence. These changes made nuclear-family membership more important and patrilineal kinship less important as a basis of rights and responsibilities, and promoted conjugal autonomy and women's entitlements. Decline in lineage power and the importance of landed property combined with the growth of rights organizations and policy institutions that address gender relations enabled these reforms. Political elites and judges only promoted changes in family practices they felt they had a basis in indigenous cultures, and politicians continued to seek broad coalitions. This dissuaded changes that could empower women such as dissolving joint property and restricting testamentary rights, but not a recent proposal to recognize rights in matrimonial property.

This chapter analyses challenges in the family law sphere, examining EU case law to assess the success of EU private international law regulations in the fields of divorce, matrimonial property, maintenance obligations and cross-border rights of access to children. It points to the difficulties facing judges, national courts and legal professionals in the application of EU regulations in this sphere.

The development of trust law in Victorian England, which led to many of the rules of equity still in force today, followed a social and economic evolution where the typical settlors were no longer members of the landed gentry but professionals and businessmen living in the cities and settling movable wealth, mainly financial assets, rather than landed estates. A similar development is taking place in the first decades of the twenty-first century, where the typical settlors are successful business people from various areas of the world, whose background is not the Anglo-American legal system and who have often accumulated an impressive wealth by running their own business. Their families may have interests in various parts of the world and succession planning is required in order to hand over the business to the next generation.

This chapter deals with the internationalisation of ‘child law,’ a trend which can be expected to continue into the twenty-first century. Family law matters more generally have been the subject of a number of international conventions throughout the last century, but the emphasis on children has been a late twentieth-century development. During the course of the last century, the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which concentrates largely on issues of choice of law and jurisdiction rather than substantive provisions, developed conventions on marriage, divorce, support, adoption, child protection, and matrimonial property. This chapter examines the 1980 Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction; the 1996 Convention on Jurisdiction, Applicable Law, Recognition, Enforcement, and Co-operation in Respect of Parental Responsibility and Measures for the Protection of Children; and the 1993 Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. It describes each Convention’s solution for achieving its objective: deterring international child abductions, recognising measures and enforcing international custody decrees across transnational borders, and facilitating intercountry adoptions.

The Austrian law of succession boasts some rather strong mechanisms for overriding a will in the interest of surviving family members. Taken together, the law of compulsory portion, the various statutory legacies, and the maintenance claims significantly reduce a testator’s freedom to pass on his or her property as the testator deems appropriate. Yet, Austrian law does not necessarily ensure that all close family members obtain minimum levels of subsistence, as the group of individuals entitled to family protection benefits is small and more or less restricted to the surviving spouse or registered partner and descendants. The position of the surviving spouse or registered partner has been continuously strengthened over the years but there is still an unfortunate discrepancy between what a surviving spouse or partner is entitled to upon death as compared with the situation upon divorce. The existing patchwork of mechanisms does not seem to have created significant problems, but still it is fair to say that the Austrian law of family protection lacks a consistent approach. This is still true after major reform in 2015, which to some extent restricted entitlements under the law of compulsory portion but also introduced further compulsory benefits. Most conspicuously, the new ‘care legacy’ may entail sweeping changes for smaller estates, and it may well happen that the whole estate goes to one or several caring family members, with heirs possibly even having to pay out of their own pockets.

In the United States, mandatory family protection is often subordinated to freedom of testation. Although spousal protection provisions exist, the content of these laws often differs dramatically from state to state. By contrast, children and other descendants of the deceased have little or no protection against disinheritance except in Louisiana. Related legal doctrines, such as the law of undue influence do, however, often serve some protective role against the unreasonable omission of descendants from a testator’s will. Even in Louisiana, which still maintains a doctrine of forced heirship, the content of the protection has changed from a law providing for family solidarity to one imposing n alimentary obligation upon the deceased in favour of limited classes of descendants.

Indonesia has a highly complex family law system, with different rules for Muslims and non-Muslims. This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the rules governing marriage for both groups, including registration requirements, the status of unregistered marriages, foreign marriage, mixed marriage, underage marriage, and polygamy. It also explains divorce law (including the grounds for ‘talak’ divorces, custody and maintenance rules, and rujuk or reconciliation), and the different forms of property dealt with when a marriage ends: harta bersama (joint matrimonial property) and harta bawaan (pre-marital property). The last part of the chapter deals with inheritance. It describes the detailed rules that apply to Muslims under the Kompilasi Hukum Islam (Compilation of Islamic Law) and to non-Muslims under the Civil Code, and how courts have interpreted them to allow more equitable divisions of deceased estates between genders.

The English legal genius that attached an obligation of conscience to the title to property brought into being what Frederick Maitland famously described as ‘perhaps the greatest and most distinctive achievement of English lawyers’. Since their first medieval appearance as ‘uses’, trusts have established themselves as the main estate planning and wealth management arrangement of the western legal tradition. Trusts succeeded in withstanding a fatal attempt to legislate them out of existence under King Henry VIII’s Statute of Uses of 1535. They subsequently spread across five continents following the expansion of the British Empire: indeed, ‘trusts’—along with ‘trade’ and ‘tea’—were one of the ‘three Ts’ traditionally associated with British civilization.