Content area
Full text
Mary Jane Mossman, Families and the Law in Canada: Cases and Commentary (Toronto: Emond-Montgomery Pubs, 2004).
I. INTRODUCTION
It is hard to imagine a current textbook in family law that could meet the needs of law teachers and students from one end of the country to the other. The most apparent challenge is that family law is a complicated issue jurisdictionally given that, as a constitutional matter, the majority of family law falls within provincial jurisdiction. At a more theoretical level, family law encompasses every area of human diversity requiring sensitive discussion of issues of gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, disability and the intersections of all of these areas. It is also an area in which there has been phenomenal change in recent years from emerging new reproductive technologies that confront issues of biology within the family, to alternative dispute models that challenge the way that conflicts within family law are addressed in practice, to the fundamental change to the definition of marriage resulting from the legalization of same-sex marriage.2 Unless it were able to spontaneously edit itself, it is hard to envision a textbook that keeps pace.
Mary Jane Mossman's text. Families and the Law in Canada,3 acknowledges these challenges and meets them head on. She has written a book that is national in scope, feminist in outlook and almost omniscient in its engagement with current areas of change. And, in the mix, she manages to confront the way in which family law is taught in Canada, while methodically laying out challenges to the law itself.
II. THEMES AND CHALLENGES
1. What is "the family" in family law?
The central challenge of this text is signaled by its title. There is no one "family" in "family law," and in teaching, learning and practising law, the place to start is with the way in which law both regulates and constructs the family.4 Any issue or problem that one encounters in this area of law is necessarily made more complex by the nature of the family form at issue. Mossman reflects the complexity of the question "what is the family?" in the way that she has structured her text. Although the book mirrors the way that most family law courses are taught in Canada/...