Children and Their Parents : A Comparative Study of the Legal Position of Children With Regard to Their Intentional and Biological Parents in English and Dutch Law

There are many different kinds of children and many different kinds of parents. This study concerns a legal question with regard to the parent-child relationship, namely how the law assigns parents to children. This subject is approached in a comparative legal perspective, covering England and The Netherlands. The book contains a detailed comparison and analysis of the manner in which the law in these two jurisdictions assigns the status of legal parent and/or attributes parental responsibility to the child's biological and intentional parents. The concept 'procreational responsibility,' which is introduced in the concluding chapter of the book, may be used as a tool to assess and reform existing regulations on legal parent-child relationships. The structure of the book, which is based on a categorization of different family types in a 'family tree,' enables the reader to have easy access to family-specific information.