During the period of lockdown in the Covid pandemic, it seemed a good idea to take the opportunity to look back over my career and attempt to articulate the main objectives which I sought to promote in it. This is partly for my own benefit in seeing whether a theme or themes emerge, and in case anyone else may be interested. When the editors of this volume saw it, they asked if they could include a version of it in the publication, and I was happy to agree. Since I must contextualise this to some extent, I will need to provide some biographical information as well.

It is appropriate that, in this chapter, I want to contemplate John Eekelaar’s article ‘Family Law and Love’: ppropriate because, whenever John’s name comes up in conversations with family lawyers, he is spoken of with remarkable warmth and affection. And his name is often spoken of by family lawyers! His impact on the academic study of family law is enormous. Anyone tempted to think that family law is a’soft’ subject for academic study, or has little of philosophical interest, will soon have their minds changed by reading any of John’s work. The depth, quality and clarity of his thought is unsurpassed.

It is a great privilege to contribute a chapter to this collection of essays in honour of John Eekelaar. His contribution to family law scholarship is unrivalled, not only for his incisive analysis and his thoughtful, compassionate approach, but also for his range. Whichever topic in family law one lights upon, one is certain to find that John has gone before. In this chapter, I want to examine the legal significance of sexual intimacy in adult relationships, drawing on John’s concern with the privileged sphere and the importance of respect for intimacy.

Child support (child maintenance) policy – in Australia at least – is designed to ensure that: (a) children of separated or divorced parents receive adequate financial support (‘adequacy’); (b) both parents contribute to the cost of supporting their children, according to their respective capacities to do so (‘equity’); and (c) government expenditure is restricted to the minimum necessary to attain these objectives (equity between parents and the State, i.e. the public – private compact). But balancing the competing needs of children, separated mothers, separated fathers and the State is a formidable challenge in the twenty-first century, because families and relationships are becoming increasingly complex and fluid.

John Eekelaar shot to fame in the academic family law world in 1971, with the publication of Family Security and Family Breakdown. This was a pioneering study of the relationship between family law and social reality – given the way in which twentieth-century family life was evolving, what was family law trying to achieve, and was it going the right way about doing it? The book set the tone for the family law scholarship of the future, including Stephen Cretney’s innovative textbook, Principles of Family Law, first published in 1974. Never again could we talk and write about the subject without paying attention to what was known about how families lived their lives, and how the courts interacted with them. The contrast with the approach taken in the early editions of Peter Bromley’s textbook on Family Law, first published in 1957, was dramatic.

In 2003, John Eekelaar published a paper on ‘Contact and the Adoption Reform’. He was writing shortly after the passage of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, but several years before its adoption reforms came into force in 2005. Eekelaar considered it necessary to ‘examine the evidence relied on by government sources which advocated an increased role for adoption’. He argued that ‘the use of adoption raises some serious difficulties’, and that ‘these arise most visibly around the issue of contact between the child and its birth family’. He also considered it ‘perhaps unfortunate that legal outcomes in this area come in packages, for these distract attention from the reality of relationships towards legal incidents of the packages’. My chapter in this volume will examine legislation, case law, empirical research and policy that has emerged on adoption and contact since the 2002 Act’s implementation, assessing the extent to which Eekelaar’s fears have been realised, as well as the normative implications.

Like so many family law scholars of my generation around the world, I owe an enormous debt to John Eekelaar. John’s book, Family Law and Social Policy, first published in 1978, was set reading when I studied family law as an undergraduate. It introduced me to the social context in which family law and family policy is embedded. It had considerable influence on my early thinking about family law and public policy.

Abstract Siblings can have a great deal in common (e.g., parents, genes, early life home env1ironments, etc.), but they are also distinct individuals with unique personalities and physical traits. This chapter discusses how researchers can use similarities and differences across siblings to investigate questions of life course epidemiology. First, it discusses how sibling fixed effects models may help deal with residual confounding from unobserved family-level factors. Second, it discusses how behavioural genetics approaches can help unravel genetic heritability from environmental determinants of health. Finally, it explains genetic linkage studies in which researchers use siblings' DNA information to learn more about the effects of chromosomal regions and genes. When considering each of these strategies, the chapter reviews the relevant literature and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the particular methods.

Abstract This chapter introduces statistical methods for twin and sibling studies using random effects models. The classic twin study begins from assessing the variance of a trait (called a phenotype by geneticists) in a large group, and attempts to estimate how much of this is due to genetic effects (heritability), how much appears to be due to shared environmental effects, and how much is due to unique environmental effects — events occurring to one twin but not another. This chapter shows how three families of random effect models, random effects models for normally distributed traits, generalized linear mixed models for binary and count data, and frailty models for survival data may be used for modelling variances in longitudinal, or life course setting. The methods are illustrated using data from The Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. The appendix provides the R and Winbugs codes that are used in the analyses.