European Challenges in Contemporary Family Law

This book contains the contributions to the third CEFL conference which took place in Oslo in June 2007. The general topic European Challenges in Contemporary Family Law has been divided into five themes:
• The Harmonisation of Family Law
• Children and Their Parents
• Irregular Marriages and the Influence of Multiculturalism
• (Property) Relations between Spouses and Cohabitants
• Cross-Border Family Relationships.

These issues are, in different ways, related to the remarkable change in family life that has taken place in Europe in the last three or four decades. Hardly any other field of law has experienced such profound and deep social and demographic changes as family law in this short period of time: an explosion in the divorce rates and extramarital cohabitation and the resulting increase in the number of children born out of wedlock; women joining the paid work force en masse, influencing, among other things, parental roles and property relations among partners; and – more recently – the growing social acceptance of same-sex relationships and new techniques of artificial insemination are just a few important features of this development. We are in the middle of a “silent revolution” in family life in Europe. And while these transformations take place, we experience a vast cross-border movement of people – both within Europe, and in the form of migration from other continents.