1. INTRODUCTION

Like so many family law scholars of my generation around the world, I owe an enormous debt to John Eekelaar. John’s book, Family Law and Social Policy, first published in 1978, was set reading when I studied family law as an undergraduate. It introduced me to the social context in which family law and family policy is embedded. It had considerable influence on my early thinking about family law and public policy.

As I went on to do postgraduate study in family law, and then became an academic specialising in the area, John’s writings were a constant source of information and inspiration. His sociolegal research, together with Mavis Maclean, gave me a model for empirical work in family law. While, early in my career, I moved from England to Australia to take up a position at the University of Sydney, I met John regularly at the world conferences of the International Society of Family Law. He became a mentor and friend over the years. John’s influence really is remarkable, for he has also been a mentor and friend to so many other family law scholars around the world.

When John wrote the first edition of Family Law and Social Policy, the social context of family law was utterly different from now, although he anticipated so many of the changes that were to come. The law’s regulation of family life was, for that reason, quite different as well. A book written now on family law and social policy would need to acknowledge and address issues arising in a very different social and cultural landscape.

This chapter seeks to discuss just one issue, and that is what questions now arise from the decentring of marriage as the legal contract (or sacrament, if you will) that provides the basis for family relations. In family law systems across the Western world, we are seven-eighths of the way through a revolution, but without a clear understanding or agreement about what the legal regulation of family life might look like when that revolution is complete.