This volume considers the impact that changing family norms have had on the responsibilities that the law allocates to people in family relationships. Contributions are drawn from a wide variety of jurisdictions in which scholars, lawyers, judges and policy-makers have been trying to discern what the appropriate correlation should be between the responsibilities that people undertake in family settings and the law that regulates family responsibilities. Part I looks at the changes that hav...

The reception of Michel Foucault's work in the social sciences and humanities has been phenomenal. Foucault's concepts and methodology have encouraged new approaches to old problems and opened up new lines of enquiry. This book assesses the contribution of Foucault's work to research and thinking in the area of health and medicine, and shows how key researchers in the sociology of health and illness are currently engaging with his ideas.Foucault, Health and Medicine explore...

What is a family? What makes someone a parent? What rights should children have? Family Law: A Very Short Introduction gives the reader an insight not only into what the law is, but why it is the way it is. It examines how laws have had to respond to social changes in family life, from rapidly rising divorce rates to surrogate mothers, and gives insight into family courts which are required to deal with the chaos of family life and often struggle to keep up-to-date with the social...

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we want criminological enquiry to promote?In addressing these questions, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks offer a sociological account of how cr...

Our physical ecosystem is not indestructible and we have obligations to hold it in trust for future generations. The same is true of our metaphysical ecosystem - the values, principles, attitudes, beliefs, and shared stories on which we have founded our society. In Bird on an Ethics Wire, Margaret Somerville explores the values needed to maintain a world that reasonable people would want to live in and pass on to their descendants.Somerville addresses the conflicts between...

Death Talk asks why, when our society has rejected euthanasia for over two thousand years, are we now considering legalizing it? Has euthanasia been promoted by deliberately confusing it with other ethically acceptable acts? What is the relation between pain relief treatments that could shorten life and euthanasia? How do journalistic values and media ethics affect the public's perception of euthanasia? What impact would the legalization of euthanasia have on concepts of human rig...

Dignity is often denounced as hopelessly amorphous or incurably theological: as feel-good philosophical window-dressing, or as the name given to whatever principles give you the answer that you think is right. This is wrong, says Charles Foster: dignity is not only an essential principle in bioethics and law; it is really the only principle. In this ambitious, paradigm-shattering but highly readable book, he argues that dignity is the only sustainable Theory of Everything in bioethics. For...

This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens. The term public reason as used here is not simply a matter of deploying principled arguments that respect the norms of democratic deliberation. Jasanoff investigates what states do in practice when they claim to be reasoning in the public interest. Reason, from this perspective, comprise...

This is a timely new edition of Sharyn L Roach Anleu′s invaluable introduction to the sociology of law and its role as a social institution and social process.Discussing current theory and key empirical research from a diverse range of perspectives Law and Social Change gives relevant examples, from various cultures and societies, to provide a sociological view which goes beyond more jurisprudential approaches to law and society.The book:• provides coverage of major...

His first book, The Great Immigration Scandal (2004), blew the whistle on abuses within the Home Office and led to the resignation of the immigration minister, Beverley Hughes. Although attacked at the time by the government and the 'liberal' media for alarmism, Moxon's analysis has now been adopted by most of the major political parties. Indeed his views on the dangers of multiculturalism were even echoed by the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, leading the Evening Standard ...

All people spend a considerable portion of their lives either as dependents or the caretakers of dependents. The fact of human dependency-a function of youth, severe illness, disability, or frail old age-marks our lives, not only as those who are cared for, but as those who engage in the work of caring. In spite of the time, energy and resources-material and emotional, social and individual-that dependency care requires, these concerns rarely enter into philosophical, legal, and political ...

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children.Harry...