Legal Recognition of Non-Conjugal Families: New Frontiers in Family Law in the US, Canada and Europe, Hart Publishing, 2021

“This book argues that insufficient recognition of new families is a legal problem that needs fixing in light of recent evolutions in family patterns and normative conceptions of ‘family’. People increasingly invest in relationships falling outside the model of the marital family, such as non-conjugal unions of friends or relatives, polyamorous relationships and various religious-based families. Despite this, Western jurisdictions retain the marital family as the relevant basis for allocating family law benefits, rights and obligations.

Part I of the book illustrates recent evolutions in family patterns and norms, and explores how law can accommodate multiple family grids without legal recognition involving normalisation. Part II focuses on courtroom litigation on the basis that courts nowadays are central avenues of social change. It takes non-conjugal families as a case study and provides an analysis of the most compelling argumentative strategies that non-conjugal families can mobilise to pursue legal recognition in Canada and the United States, and within the systems of the European Convention of Human Rights and the European Union […] “

Programme

Introductory speech  (18.00-18.10)
Roberto Toniatti, University of Trento
Marco Ventura, FBK-Centre for Religious Sciences & University of Siena

Talk (18.10-19.30)
Moderator:
Alexander Schuster, University of Innsbruck & Institute for Italian Law

Katharina Boele-Woelki, Bucerius Law School
Naomi R. Cahn, University of Virginia School of Law
Mathias W. Reimann, University of Michigan Law School
Erez Aloni, University of British Columbia, Peter A. Allard School of Law
Nausica Palazzo, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & FBK-Centre for Religious Sciences