Grandparent contact: another presumption?

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the debate about the enhancement of grandparents’ legal status in relation to their grandchildren. In particular, it observes that calls for a legal presumption in favour of grandparent contact with their grandchildren when family relationships break down were emboldened by the enactment in s1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 of a presumption that involvement of both parents in their children’s lives furthers children’s welfare. Proponents of grandparent rights argued that there should be a similar statutory presumption in favour of grandparent involvement. It is also argued that courts should strictly enforce child arrangement orders that give grandparents time with grandchildren. The article examines the welfare case for such involvement and concludes that there is no unequivocal evidence to support it. It also considers the effect of the presumption in s1(2A). The article concludes that to enact a similar presumption in favour of grandparents, to apply a de facto presumption, to enforce orders strictly and even to remove the leave requirement that currently exists, could prejudice the interests of mothers as well as children.     

Continuity and Change

正It became commonplace during former U.S. President Donald Trump's tenure to hear the Communist Party of China(CPC) maligned in Cold War-style rhetoric, with the emphasis on "communist" and Marxist as the dirtiest of words, which were then stretched into alarmist fantasies alleging China's efforts to impose a communist vision globally.     

Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates

This article challenges the thesis that the publication of William Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 minimized the philosophical impact of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work the Rights of Woman in nineteenth-century American political thought. Instead, we demonstrate that leading nineteenth-century American women's rights advocates—Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—understood themselves to be in a critical, philosophical dialogue with the text of the Rights of Woman , and in some cases, the Memoirs , and defined their own, distinctive philosophies of sex equality partly within this context.