Thermodynamics of de Sitter black holes with a conformally coupled scalar field

We study the thermodynamics of de Sitter black holes with a conformally coupled scalar field. The geometry is that of the ``lukewarm'' Reissner-Nordstrom-de Sitter black holes, with the event and cosmological horizons at the same temperature. This means that the region between the event and cosmological horizons can form a regular Euclidean instanton. The entropy is modified by the non-minimal coupling of the scalar field to the geometry, but can still be derived from the Euclidean action, provided suitable modifications are made to deal with the electrically charged case. We use the first law as derived from the isolated horizons formalism to compute the local horizon energies for the event and cosmological horizons.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, REVTEX. Minor changes, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Solidarity, autonomy and equality: mixed messages for the family?

AcceptedThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Jordans publishing.Whereas solidarity was the backbone of both family life and (patriarchal) family law, autonomy (and equality) are arguably becoming the concepts of reform within modern family law. Yet whilst autonomy is an alluring concept and one which is difficult to argue against from an individual perspective, this article challenges its suitability as a driving principle of family regulation. It is suggested that the players within family life (in all styles of relationship) have not and perhaps cannot be assumed to achieve sufficient substantive equality for autonomy to rule the private family sphere, where structural issues and gendered social norms within wider society expose some family members more than others to relationship-generated disadvantage. Rather, this paper argues that we need to address the mixed messages being sent by recognising the need for interdependence within family life and the obstacles to substantive equality and autonomy in this frame. This is best done by promoting the positive notion of family solidarity as the centre-piece of family law, rather than autonomy, which, it is suggested, would avoid falling prey to the negative association with victimhood that has been experienced by notions of dependency and vulnerability in these debates

Community of property - the logical response to Miller and McFarlane?

The House of Lords decision in Miller v Miller; McFarlane v McFarlane [2006] UKHL 24 edges us closer to a community of property approach to ancillary relief on divorce where assets exceed needs. Drawing on an empirical project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, this paper will consider whether discretion has had its day and should be replaced by a formal community of property regime in England and Wales.Nuffield Foundatio

Cohabiting relationships, money and property: the legal backdrop

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleAuthor version deposited in accordance with Publisher self archiving policy. The definitive published version is available from Elsevier doi:10.1016/j.socec.2006.12.037Unlike most European jurisdictions where the law imposes a system of ‘community of property’, in English law marrying or entering a civil partnership has no legal effect on a couple's property. Neither does cohabitation. However, on relationship breakdown family law provides for redistribution of income and assets between the parties for those divorcing or dissolving their civil partnership at the court's discretion. Yet for separating cohabiting couples, a more rigid property law determines the outcome irrespective of the couple's financial practices during the relationship. At a time when there is a call for greater harmonisation of Family Law within Europe, the English Law Commission are considering reform of the law relating to financial provision for cohabiting couples. Drawing on empirical research into attitudes towards community of property, this article considers how far the current legal treatment of money and relationships remains appropriate to 21st century coupledom

Legislating for cohabitation in common law jurisdictions in Europe: Two Steps Forward and One step Back?

PublishedThis is the author's version of a chapter accepted for publication by Interentia. The definitive version was published as Barlow, Anne, Legislating for Cohabitation In Common Law Jurisdictions in Europe: Two Steps Forward and One Step Back?, in Boele-Woelki K, Dethloff N, Gerhart W (eds) Family Law and Culture in Europe: Developments, Challenges and Opportunities, Cambridge: Intersentia, 2014, 77-93. http://www.intersentia.com/searchDetail.aspx?bookId=102594Within Europe, the common law jurisdictions of England and Wales, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland have not taken a unified approach in their legal response to the increasingly common social phenomenon of unmarried cohabitation. Whereas both Scotland and Ireland have recently legislated to provide financial provision remedies as between cohabiting partners on relationship breakdown, in England and Wales (and in Northern Ireland), there are still no family law remedies for financial provision when such relationships break down. This is despite the Law Commission for England and Wales recommending reform in 2007 (see Cohabitation: the financial consequences of relationship breakdown, Law Com No 307, CM 7182, (2007) London: TSO). Interestingly, in the recent Supreme Court decision of the Scottish case of Gow v Grant (Scotland) [2012] UKSC 29, the Supreme Court Justices expressed their frustration at this state of affairs, calling loudly for English law to be changed in line with that of Scotland. Yet so far these calls have fallen on deaf ears. Thus whilst England and Wales has now seemingly embraced legal recognition of same-sex marriage, heterosexual cohabitation continues to be regarded by government as a social problem and a threat to formal marriage, with both the Scottish approach to compensating economic disadvantage within cohabitation relationships and an extension of civil partnerships to different-sex couples having been recently rejected once again by government. Drawing on socio-legal research evidence and discussion (including the continued existence of the ‘common law marriage myth’), this paper will explore these legal and policy developments in all three jurisdictions against the background of the changing socio-demographic nature of family structures within these societies. It will consider whether the piecemeal legal response to cohabitation in England and Wales provides adequate remedies, given policy objectives, or alternatively whether the Irish and/or Scottish solutions could be appropriately adopted within England and Wales (and Northern Ireland) or indeed, whether a different approach is called for

Configuration(s) of unpaid caregiving within current legal discourse in and around the family.

© Queen's University of Belfast: School of Law.Using a feminist critique, this article explores the sliding scale of value attributed by law to unpaid caregiving in the (heterosexual) family context. Whereas in private family law, recent decisions have radically changed the direction of this discourse and placed a very high value on such a contribution to family life where it occurs in the married context, the same kind of caregiving activity is attributed afar diminished value within cohabitation law whilst, when sited within statedependent single parenthood, its value becomes at best nonexistent or even negative, with paid work assumed to be the carer's ultimate goal. This article considers some issues arising from this evolving legal framework from the perspective of gender relations. What are the implications from an equality-seeking perspective only valuing caregiving highly in dependent patriarchalr elationships,p articularlyi n a society that continues to retreat from the welfare state? Might greater participation of men in unpaid caregiving remove obstacles inherent in the gendered nature of the debate and permit a more positive reconfiguration of the discourse surrounding it? What effect might the extension of the law of financial relief to civil partners have on the discourse from an equality perspective

Cohabitation law reform - messages from research

© 2006 Springer.The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10691-006-9026-xPost print version deposited in accordance with SHERPA RoMEO guidelines.Empirical research in this field has underlined the diversity of the cohabitation population, the existence of the common law marriage myth and the lack of consensus on the best way forward for reform of the law in England and Wales. Against the backdrop of the English Law Commission’s on-going project on cohabitation law, this article will explore the reasons found by recent research for people’s choice of cohabitation over marriage, the interrelationship between commitment and economic vulnerability and the tension in feminist debates as to whether an extension of rights for opposite-sex cohabitants that are analogous to married spouses (either by an opt-in model or opt-out model) might be an appropriate solution or a reinforcement of patriarchal marriage values. It will also consider, given recent research findings and other initiatives aimed at raising awareness about the legal differences between different styles of cohabitation relationship, law’s dual and conflicting role in shaping regulated family structures whilst both protecting vulnerable family members inside and outside such structures and at the same time also offering socially acceptable standards of dispute resolution in this most personal of spheres

Legal Rationality and Family Property

PublishedThis author version was accepted for publication by Hart Publishing and has been submitted in line with the publisher's self archiving. The definitive version is available from the publisher, published as chapter 14 within J. Miles and R. Probert, Sharing Lives, Dividing Assets: An Interdisciplinary Study (Hart Publishing, 2009), pp. 303-320. http://www.hartpub.co.uk/BookDetails.aspx?ISBN=9781841132594.Family law, in so far as it is trying to regulate disputes relating to money and property on relationship breakdown, has its work cut out. For it is trying to deal in a rational way with issues between people who are in an emotionally charged relationship situation and where most might predict that rationality is unlikely to prevail (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). Whilst some, such as John Dewar, see the answer as conceding to what he terms ‘the normal chaos of family law’ which nonetheless works on a practical level due to the pragmatic solutions of professionals operating within a discretionary legal framework (Dewar, 1998), others have argued that this is not the optimal way forward for family law in general (Henaghan, 2008) and the regulation of new family forms in particular (Barlow et al, 2005). This chapter will therefore consider whether family law can avoid the trap of a ‘rationality mistake’ – whereby legislators overestimate the law’s ability to steer behaviour in a particular direction (Barlow and Duncan, 2000; Barlow et al, 2005) – yet still develop a coherent theory of family law to apply in this field (Eekelaar, 2006; Henaghan, 2008). It has been argued convincingly by critical theorists that family law ‘needs to be socially located’ (see eg Freeman, 1985: 153–54). Given shifting attitudes and more complex married and unmarried families resulting from changed parenting, partnering, and repartnering patterns and behaviours, this presents a real challenge. In rising to this, it will be argued by drawing on empirical research that it is now time to take stock of both the emotional and economic foundations and commitment on which modern couple relationships are built in order to consider how family law should weigh the competing values of promoting personal financial autonomy yet providing legal protection for the economically weaker partner on relationship breakdown. Arguably this has already been done in the cohabitation context by the Law Commission in its consideration of proposals for the reform of cohabitation law (Law Commission, 2007). But has the right balance been struck here? Is the current legal hierarchy still fit for purpose or are we drawing the regulatory lines in the wrong places? These are the questions this chapter aims to pursue. In so doing, it will draw on empirical research to examine whether family law in this area can find a way to cope with its chaotic raw material, avoid the legal rationality mistake yet become sufficiently coherent to provide satisfactory outcomes for those it serves

News media constructions of male perpetrated intimate partner homicide

The news media are powerful purveyors of culture in North America. Crime news reporting particularly is an influential means by which the news media define the boundaries of deviant and non-deviant behaviour. For the purposes of the present research, I examined the ways that the print news media constructed cases of male-perpetrated Intimate Partner Homicide (IPH) in Alberta. Using a social constructionist theoretical orientation grounded in an Ethnographic Content Analysis methodology, I examined 381 newspaper articles that discussed four separate incidents of male-perpetrated IPH. Approaching these data from the perspective of media reciprocity and a social constructionism epistemology, I considered the various ways that the print media presented these cases for their audience, but also the various ways that the audience’s expectations and the general zeitgeist of the culture may have affected this presentation. Much of the dominant discourse in the cases I studied was consistent with previous research examining IPH presentations in the news media, namely that the media present victims and perpetrators in stereotyped ways according to their gender and ethnicity. However, I also examined some less prominent themes, including those that were pro-feminist, ambivalent, fictionalized, and constructed for the purpose of audience titillation and voyeurism. Additionally, owing to the qualitative nature of the methodology, I was able to examine discussions that subverted the stereotypical representation of victims and perpetrators in the news media and examine how these presentations could affect audience understanding of the phenomenon of IPH. Overall, the present project led to a discussion of how the media construct various facets of psychology and feminism and how these facets are in turn constructed by society in a reciprocal process whereby the media influence culture and culture correspondingly affects the media

Is modern marriage a bargain? Exploring perceptions of pre-nuptial agreements in England and Wales

types: ArticleAuthors' pre-print version archived with permission of the publisher. Final version published by Jordan; available at http://www.jordanpublishing.co.uk/online-services/family-lawDrawing on data from a recent national and follow-up study exploring attitudes towards binding pre-nuptial agreements at a time when the Law Commission was considering law reform, this article considers what might be gained and lost in family law terms by their introduction. Looking at the tensions between providing autonomy to agree arrangements at the outset of a marriage and achieving fairness between the parties at the point of divorce, questions were framed in the study to consider views on the socio-legal and psychological issues surrounding a move towards making pre-nuptial agreements binding. In particular, it explored whether we are ready culturally to use pre-nuptial agreements and any perceived limit to their acceptability. In addition, were there situations where pre-nuptial agreements were considered more or less appropriate for those entering marriage? How might they affect the commitment involved in marriage? More generally, in the light of the study’s findings, the article examines the implications of a legal and moral shift away from a paternalistic court redistribution of assets at the point of divorce towards an approach based on enforcement of a pre-maritally determined private contract, and concludes by considering what sort of a bargain it would be acceptable for modern marriage to become