Gillian Douglas, Mervyn Murch and Victoria Stephens (eds), International and National Perspectives on Child and Family Law
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2020.0638 |
| Pages | 308-309 |
This book, which is the 2018 Festschrift for Professor Nigel Lowe, is a veritable Who's Who of family lawyers from academia and practice. Reflecting Lowe's enormous contribution to international family law, the contributors are drawn from a wide range of jurisdictions: England and Wales being most abundantly represented, but with writers from Bulgaria, France, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the US also offering valuable contributions.
After an introductory chapter from the editors, the collection is divided into three parts. The first, containing nine essays, focuses on “Family and Child Law in England and Wales”. The second part, on “International Family Law”, offers fourteen essays, while the third part concludes the collection with three essays on the “Future of Family Law”. Certain themes emerge clearly across these parts, reflecting Lowe's particular contributions to family and child law scholarship. These are: the nature of the parent/child relationship; international child abduction; and the use of empirical data in informing scholarship and law reform. With twenty-six different contributions, it is not possible to review them all. However, the final section, looking to the future, rather neatly brings together all three themes, in the essays “The Hague Child Abduction Convention in a Changing World” (Rhona Schuz), “Using Research to Improve Outcomes for Abducted Children” (Nicola Taylor and Marilyn Freeman), and “Breaking the Existing Paradigms of Parent-Child Relationships” (Jens M Scherpe). This review will provide a brief summary of the important message conveyed by all three of these chapters.
Schuz's work brings together the latest judicial developments in relation to two key concepts in the 1980 Hague International Child Abduction Convention (“Convention”). As she notes, habitual residence has proven to be one of “the most difficult concepts” (317), raising questions such as whether one parent can unilaterally change the child's habitual residence and the issues thrown up by residence which is – or at least is initially intended to be – temporary. She offers a set of steps to promote uniformity and certainty in the application of the doctrine, before turning her attention to the “grave risk of harm” doctrine. This is, she notes, one of the most commonly pleaded and commonly relied upon exceptions to the return of the child. She provides brief analyses of child participation and state compliance, before concluding that...
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