Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.t01-1-00336 |
| Date | 01 May 2001 |
| Published date | 01 May 2001 |
REVIEWS
Mavis Maclean (ed),Making Law for Families, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000, xi +
211 pp, pb £20.00.
Academic family lawyers frequently suggest what they consider to be necessary
reforms to the existing body of law. And when they are not recommending reform
measures of their own conception, they are often to be found criticising recent
legislative developments thought up by others. Much less frequently do they focus their
reflective and analytical skills on the actual process of family law making. Maclean’s
edited volume, Making Law for Families, is a collection of essays (originally presented
as papers at a workshop convened at On
˜ati, Spain in 1999) that goes some way towards
redressing the balance. It draws on both the practical experiences and perceptive
reflections of a fairly impressive array of international academic family lawyers, most
of whom – whether as advisors, or as actual draftsmen – have had some involvement in
the law-making process. Yet, measured against the objective set by the editor that this
volume should help ‘to develop the theory of the legislative process in a grounded way’
(p 1), the collection warrants only a lukewarm reception.
While each of the nine substantive contributions makes for interesting reading, it is
doubtful whether all them contribute to the editor’s stated objective. Take, for
example, Benoit Bastard’s ‘Administrative Divorce in France: A Controversy Over a
Reform, that Never Reached the Statute Book’. This essay provides little more than a
descriptive account of a reform proposal that fell by the wayside in France largely
because of institutional opposition. In documenting the rise and fall of the proposal –
in essence, that the French divorce process should be conducted in town halls not
courts, and be managed by mayors not judges – Bastard’s essay relies far too heavily
on the simple bloc quotation of large chunks of articles that appeared in a select few
French newspapers. Indeed, roughly six pages of this twenty-page contribution are
taken up in this way, and the cost to the chapter is levied in terms of academic merit.
For while the essay clearly demonstrates that family law reform in France has
become as politicised as in this and other countries, the point could have been made
much more succinctly. In a frank admission, the author himself confesses that in
reading his essay ‘we are doing no more than considering an example of a projected
legal reform which . . . has not been adopted, and is not for the time being on the
statute book’ (p 72).
Chapters 7 and 8 are similarly descriptive essays which provide accounts of family
policy and family law making in Poland and Bulgaria since 1989 and 1997
respectively. Here, again, while the contributions make for interesting reading, they
do so more in the nature of modern legal history than insightful comparative family
law. To take one example from the chapter by Malgorzata Fuszara and Beata Laciak,
we are informed that the divorce rate in Poland in 1989 was a shade over 1 per 1,000
of the population (compared with nearly 13 per 1,000 in this country at that time). We
are then told that from 1994 there had been ‘a slow but systematic [sic] increase in the
number of divorces in Poland’ (p 120) such that, by 1997, the rate had crept up to a
dizzying 1.1 per 1,000. The following five pages then describe (somewhat
repetitiously) the campaign to reform the law so as to curb this ‘alarming’ increase
in the divorce rate, only to inform us at the very end of the section that ‘[t]he 1997
Parliamentary elections put a stop to work on the draft Bill’ (p 124). Again, the only
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2001 (MLR 64:3, May). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
512
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