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What Law Has Joined: Family Relations and Categories of Kinship in the European Court of Human Rights

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The Palgrave Handbook of Family Sociology in Europe

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Abstract

The legal recognition of different forms of family relations has expanded a great deal in Europe in recent years. Most political and legal change has taken place with the legal sex of an individual becoming less important than before in the formal recognition of family relations. In this chapter, it is argued with empirical examples from the case law of the European Court of Human Rights that what law has joined, is seldom undone even with the force of law itself. However, the malleability of legal family relations is conditional. Unions between adults such as marriage are easier to modify in terms of legal sex and gender identity than parental relations, which rarely escape the irreducible differences between female and male bodies underpinning human reproduction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Linda Hart

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  1. Linda Hart
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Correspondence to Linda Hart .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland

    Anna-Maija Castrén

  2. Faculty of Human and Social Studies, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Vida Česnuitytė

  3. Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy

    Isabella Crespi

  4. University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jacques-Antoine Gauthier

  5. Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Rita Gouveia

  6. EHESP, CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research), Rennes, France

    Claude Martin

  7. Campus María Zambrano, University of Valladolid, Segovia, Spain

    Almudena Moreno Mínguez

  8. Institute of Sociology, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland

    Katarzyna Suwada

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Hart, L. (2021). What Law Has Joined: Family Relations and Categories of Kinship in the European Court of Human Rights. In: Castrén, AM., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Family Sociology in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73306-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73306-3_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73305-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73306-3

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