THE SHADOW OF OBSOLESCENCE ON FAMILY LAW RULES

Authors: Rosamaria Tristano

ABSTRACT

Legal rules are different from any other rule because they are legally binding, which means that a country recognizes them as right, and then enforceable, and ensures their observance.
They are legally relevant, and issued because of their effectiveness in pursuing values and objectives that each country acknowledges as its own, but from this fact comes an observation: what happens when a legal rule that is in force does not reflect society and its changes and necessities?
Regardless the binding value of a law rule, in fact, it is truly perceived as a “right” one by the people when it reflects their needs, and it gets complicated when law rules are outdated or connected to an obsolete socio-cultural background.
This situation particularly affects family law, because family is a concept that is more tightly connected with society than any other and has been strongly influenced by the technological and social development of the last decades but, undeniably, the innovation wasn’t the same for family law rules, which to a large extent are still referring to outdated concepts.
That is the reason why we talk of obsolescence as a dark side of family law, analyzing the different approaches of the Italian system and the British one through their acts and decisions regarding some recent issues of family law, such as surrogate motherhood and medically assisted procreation.

Keywords: Family law - Same sex parenting - Surrogate motherhood - Medically assisted procreation

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