ABSTRACT
With the change in the philosophy of family practitioners has come a widening of the range of sub-divisions of family law, so now the modern family lawyer has an increasingly unwieldy portfolio of topics to service. In academic terms, as a survey for the National Centre for Legal Education’s manual Teaching Family Law showed, this has meant that undergraduate courses now either embrace one (so called ‘long thin’) family course spread over one academic year, or two or more (so called ‘short fat’) modules studied over two semesters. The long thin course usually covers marriage, divorce and other decrees, including financial relief and increasingly mediation, plus child law and the unmarried family. The short fat modules course usually consists of one module covering marriage, divorce and allied topics, while child law-including children’s rights, child abduction, adoption, human assisted reproduction and termination of pregnancy-makes up a separate course. However, as mentioned above, some courses look at the family in a wider context, including a study of the termination of marriage, and give greater space to the study of the consequences of cohabitation, and of the wider concepts of the family, such as in homosexual and extended family relationships. Some universities actually identify this imaginative type of course quite separately with labels such as ‘the law of relationships’.
