Dr Sarah Trotter

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law and LLB in Laws. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course is available to General Course students.

This is a course about the way in which law constructs and regulates family relationships and about the effect of that regulation on those relationships. We will examine law’s idea of ‘the family’ and its ways of engaging with a range of relationships, including those that have tended to preoccupy family law (namely relationships between couples and between children and their parents) and those that have tended to attract less legal attention (including relationships between grandparents and grandchildren and between siblings). The kinds of questions that we will explore include: how should disputes over children be resolved? In what circumstances should a local authority intervene to remove a child from their family? How should the state respond to domestic abuse? Should cohabiting siblings be able to have a civil partnership? How should money and property be distributed in the event of a couple’s separation? How should the law respond to a situation in which a birthmother conceals her pregnancy and wants the baby to be taken into care without the birthfather’s knowledge? If you are interested in thinking through such questions and in embarking on a broader inquiry into how and why law constructs a particular vision of ‘the family’ and indeed regulates family life at all, then this could be a good course for you.



The structure of the course will be as follows: In the first term we will study: 1. Legal constructions of ‘the family’, ‘family life’, and ‘families’; 2. Legal gender; 3. The institutions of marriage and civil partnership and the rise of cohabitation; 4. The law of marriage and civil partnership; 5. Divorce and dissolution; 6. Family finances (including child support); 7. Financial orders on divorce and dissolution; 8. The nature and extent of domestic abuse; 9. Legal measures and state obligations in relation to domestic abuse; 10. Inheritance law. In the second term we will study: 1. The family justice system; 2. Child law in practice; 3. Legal parenthood and parental responsibility; 4. Child welfare; 5. Children’s rights; 6. Post-separation parenting and disputes over children; 7. Child protection; 8. Adoption.

There will be a 2-hour lecture and a 1-hour class every week in the Autumn Term and the Winter Term. In the Spring Term (and before the exam) there will be two revision sessions (a 2-hour lecture and a 1-hour class). This course includes a reading week in Weeks 6 of the Autumn Term and the Winter Term.

You will be expected to write 1 essay in the Autumn Term and 1 essay in the Winter Term. Additional optional essays will be set at the end of each term.

A course guide containing the syllabus will be provided at the start of the course and a reading list and handout with questions to think about will be provided for each topic. The essential reading for each class will be based on articles and cases.



To get a sense of the subject of family law prior to commencing the course, I would suggest reading Family Law and Personal Life (2nd edition) by John Eekelaar (2017, Oxford University Press) and In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law by Sarah Langford (2018, Doubleday).

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.