Determining Legal Parentage Between Family Law and Contract Law

The last few decades have witnessed dramatic changes affecting the institutions of family and parenthood. If, in the past, the classic family was defined sociologically as a pair of heterosexual parents living together under one roof along with their children, different sociological changes have led to a rapid and extreme transformation in the definitions of family, marital relations, parenthood, and the relationship between parents and children. Dr Yehezkel Margalit explores whether and to what extent there is room, legally and ethically, for the use of modern contractual devices and doctrines to privately regulate the establishment of legal parentage. This book offers intentional parenthood as the most appropriate and flexible normative doctrine for resolving the dilemmas which have surfaced in the field of determining legal parentage. By using the certainty of contract law, determining the legal status of parenthood will be seen as the best method to sort out ambiguities and assure both parental and children rights.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The shift in the traditional family structure, modern ART and how they are undermining the accepted models for determining legal parentage; 2. An overview of the current ART, the dilemmas it surfaces and the role of DLPBA in the positive law; 3. Overview of the objections to DLPBA in the positive legal system; 4. An overview of the arguments that support DLPBA; 5. Refuting the objections to DLPBA in the positive legal system; 6. The theoretical and practical infrastructure of DLPBA; 7. Implementing DLPBA in the various scenarios; Conclusions; Index; Bibliography.

Yehezkel Margalit is Senior Lecturer of Law at Netanya Academic College and Bar-Ilan University and Visiting Research Scholar at New York University Law School (2011–2012). He is the author of The Jewish Family: Between Family Law and Contract Law (Cambridge, 2018).