This collection brings together some of the most eminent and exciting authors researching family responsibilities to examine understandings of the day to day responsibilities which people undertake within families and the role of the law in the construction of those understandings. The authors explore a range of questions fundamental to our understanding of 'responsibility' in family life: To whom, and to what ends, are family members responsible? Is responsibility primarily a matter of care? Can we fulfil our family responsibilities by paying those to whom we owe responsibility? Or by paying others to fulfil our caring obligations for us? In each of these circumstances the chapters in this collection explore what it means to have family responsibilities, what constitutes an adequate performance of such responsibilities and the point at which the state intervenes. At the heart of this collection is an interest in the way in which the changing family affects people's perception and exercise their family responsibilities, and how the law attempts to regulate (and understand) those responsibilities. The essays range across intact and separated or fragmented families, from lone and shared parenting in single homes to caring across households (and even across international boundaries) to reflect on the actual caring responsibilities of family members and on the fulfilment of financial responsibilities in families. This collection seeks to advance our understanding of the attempts of the law, and its limits, in regulating the responsibilities which family members take for each other.

Chapter 1: Supporting, Fostering and Coercing? The Legal Regulation of the Exercise of Family Responsibilities; Part I: The Gendered Nature of Family Responsibility; Chapter 2: Parent's Work-Life Balance: Beyond Responsibilities and Obligations to Agency and Capabilities; Chapter 3: The Responsible Father in New Labour's Legal and Social Policy; Chapter 4: The Court of Motherhood: Affect, Alienation and Redefinitions of Responsible Parenting; Chapter 5: Responsibility in Family Finance and Property Law; Part II: Regulating Responsibilities in Fragmented Families; Chapter 6: Negotiating Shared Residence: The Experience of Separated Fathers in Britain and France; Chapter 7: Law's Gendered Understandings of Parents' Responsibilities in Relation to Shared Residence; Chapter 8: Regulating Responsibilities in Relocation Disputes; Chapter 9: Child Abduction in the European Union: Recognizing and Regulating Care and Migration; Part III: Acknowledging Caring Responsibilities?; Chapter 10: Grandparent Involvement and Adolescent Adjustment: Should Grandparents have Legal Rights?; Chapter 11: Reflections on the Duty to Care for the Elderly in Portugal; Chapter 12: Elder Abuse and Stressing Carers; Chapter 13: Intensive Caring Responsibilities and Crimes of Compassion? 1; Chapter 14: Sufficiency of Home Care for Extraordinary Children: Gender and Health Law in Canada; Chapter 15: Why We Should Care About Global Caring 1