Children & the Law Shaping the Modern Welfare Principle in the British Isles

Balancing a child’s welfare interests and rights so as to ensure recognition and respect for his or her autonomous identity, while facilitating family unity, has become a major challenge for modern family law. This book, following on from The Principle of the Welfare of the Child: A History, examines, contrasts, and compares the response of England and Wales and Ireland to that challenge. It does so by applying the same matrix of indicators to explore, in each country, the distinction between welfare interests and rights and to trace changes in the balance between them. By profiling the nations in accordance with the same indicators, it reveals important jurisdictional differences in the extent to which welfare interests or rights determine how the law is currently applied to children.

Acknowledgements Introduction PART I Moving away from a traditional interpretation of welfare 1 Children: Their welfare interests and the law 2 Advocates for change PART II Shaping the modern welfare principle 3 Domestic influences 4 International influences PART III Profiling contemporary jurisdictional experiences of welfare 5 England and Wales 6 Ireland PART IV Jurisdictional analysis of a child’s welfare/rights: A thematic approach 7 Themes and a comparative jurisdictional analysis Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index

Kerry O’Halloran, recently retired, has for 13 years been Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, QUT, Australia.