Protect your rights -- protect your relationship! Now more than ever, it's important that you take the proper legal steps to define and protect your relationship in the eyes of the law. If you don't, you run the risk of being shut out of each other's lives -- and the lives of children you co-parent -- in times of medical, financial or personal crisis. This practical, plain-English guide shows lesbian and gay couples how to: make practical decisions about living together obtain domestic partner benefits make medical decisions for each other when needed take care of each other's finances when one partner is incapacitated leave property to each other have and raise children through adoption, donor insemination, surrogacy or foster parenting This edition is updated with a discussion of the laws of each state offering either marriage or marriage-equivalent status, covers all the new state laws in recent months, and discusses the pros and cons of entering into a marriage or like relationship.

Thoroughly revised and updated, a valuable resource for gay and lesbian couples explains how to obtain domestic-partner benefits, plan for medical emergencies, purchase property together, inheritance rights, and the practical and legal aspects of having and raising children, along with a new section on the laws of states offering an equivalent to marriage. Original.

Product Description: The interaction between individual rights, which are often seen in secular terms, and religion is becoming an important and complex topic not only for academic study but for practical policy. This volume collects a range of writings from journals, edited collections and individual books which deal with different aspects of the interaction within the context of family life, and which appear with their original pagination...read more

Product Description: This book is comprised, consolidated, and annotated legislation including coverage of the Children and Family Law Relationships Act 2015. Each section is annotated to indicate amendments or repeals-key legal information which is quickly accessible and clearly outlined...read more

Product Description: Tried and tested by undergraduate law students across the UK. 94% of students polled agree that Law Express helps them to revise effectively and take exams with confidence. 88% agree that Law Express helps them to understand key concepts quickly...read more

Product Description: Whether considered from an American or a European perspective, the past four decades have seen family life become increasingly complex. Changing Family Dynamics and Demographic Evolution examines the various stages of change through the image of a kaleidoscope, providing new insights into the field of family dynamics and diversity...read more

Product Description: Changes in family structures, demographics, social attitudes and economic policies over the last sixty years have had a large impact on family lives and correspondingly on family law. This book provides global perspectives on the policy challenges facing family law and policy round the world...read more

Product Description: Most people believe that parents have rights to direct their children's education and upbringing. But why? What grounds those rights? How broad is their scope? Can we defend parental rights against those who believe we need more extensive state educational control to protect children's autonomy or prepare them for citizenship in a diverse society? Amid heated debates over issues like sexual education, diversity education and vouchers, Moschella cuts to the heart of the matter, explaining why education is primarily the responsibility of parents, not the state...read more

Product Description: Hayes & Williams' Family Law provides comprehensive, critical, and case-focused discussion of the key legislation and debates affecting adults and children. Cases are at the heart of family law and this textbook offers copious case detail, with comprehensive summaries throughout the text to ensure students understand the development of family law through the courts...read more

Blends memoir and legal cases to show how contracts can create family relationships  Most people think of love and contracts as strange bedfellows, or even opposites. In Love’s Promises, however, law professor Martha Ertman shows that far from cold and calculating, contracts shape and sustain families. Blending memoir and law, Ertman delves into the legal cases, anecdotes, and history of family law to show that love comes in different packages, each shaped by different contracts and mini-contracts she calls “deals.” Family law should and often does recognize that variety because legal rules, like relationships, aren’t one size fits all. The most common form of family—which Ertman calls “Plan A”—come into being through different kinds of agreements than the more uncommon families that she dubs “Plan B.” Recognizing the contractual core of all families shows that Plan B is neither unnatural nor unworthy of legal recognition, just different.After telling her own moving and often irreverent story about becoming part of a Plan B family of two moms and a dad raising a child, Ertman shows that all kinds of people—straight and gay, married and single, related by adoption or by genetics—use contracts to shape their relationships. As couples navigate marriage, reproductive technologies, adoption, and cohabitation, they encounter contracts. Sometimes hidden and other times openly acknowledged, these contracts ensure that the people they think of as “family” are legally recognized as family in the eyes of the law.  Family exchanges can be substantial, like vows of fidelity, or small, like “I cook and you clean.” But regardless of scope, the agreements shape the emotional, social, and financial terrain of family relationships. Seeing the instrumental role contracts will help readers better understand how contracts and deals work in their own families as well as those around them. Both insightful and paradigm-shifting, Love’s Promises lets readers in on the power of contracts and deals to support love in its many forms and to honor the different ways that our nearest and dearest contribute to our daily lives.