Description
This book explores the intersecting issues relating the phenomenon of ageing to gender and family law. The latter has tended to focus mainly on family life in young and middle age; and, indeed, the issues of childhood and parenting are key in many family law texts. Family life for older members has, then, been largely neglected; addressing this neglect, the current volume explores how the issues which might be important for younger people are not necessarily the same as those for older people. The significance of family, the nature of family life, and the understanding of self in terms of one’s relationships, tend to change over the life course. For example, the state may play an increasing role in the lives of older people – as access to services, involvement in work and the community, the ability to live independently, and to form or maintain caring relationships, are all impacted by law and policy. This collection therefore challenges the standard models of family life and family law that have been developed within a child/parent-centred paradigm, and which may require rethinking in the turn to family life in old age. Interdisciplinary in its scope and orientation, this book will appeal not just to academic family lawyers and students interested in issues around family law, ageing, gender, and care; but also to sociologists and ethicists working in these areas.
Table of Contents
Introduction - Bev Clough and Jonathan Herring
PART 1
Care, Vulnerability and Age
- Embracing Vulnerability in Ageing: Our Route to Flourishing? - Daniel Bedford
- The Contractualistion of Care in an Aging World - Pip Coore
- Ageing, vulnerability and care: a view from social gerontology - Liz Lloyd
- Financial Abuse of Older Persons: A Criminal Law Perspective - Jennifer Collins
- Safeguarding in Older Age - Alison Brammer
PART 2
Rights and State Institutions
- Accountability, social justice and social care decision-making: Reflections on the Responsive State - Beverley Clough
- Revisiting the Feminist Critique of Rights: Lessons for a New Older Persons’ Convention? - Laura Pritchard-Jones
- Impoverishing care - Ann Stewart
- Older prisoners, gender and family life - Susan Easton
PART 3
Relationships in Old Age
- Ageing, Love and Family Law - Jonathan Herring
- Which ageing ‘families’ count? Older lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and/or queer (LGBT*Q) – relational legal in/exclusions in (older age) family law - Sue Westwood
- Inheritance law matters - Daniel Monk
- Looking after grandchildren: unfair and differential impacts? - Felicity Kaganas & Christine Piper
- Grandparents and Grandchildren: Relatedness, Relationships and Responsibility – Rachel Taylor
