Family Law and Culture in Europe ― Developments, Challenges and Opportunities

This volume contains the contributions delivered at CEFL's fifth international conference. It focuses on comparative and international family law in Europe in their respective cultural contexts. The interventions address the new Principles of European Family Law regarding Property Relations between Spouses, the proposed EU private international law regulations for spouses and registered partners for international couples and their property relations, the laws of a growing number of countries which legislate non-formalized relationships and the new developments regarding social, biological and legal parentage.

Nina Dethloff holds the Chair for Private Law, Private International Law, Comparative Law and European Private Law and is Director of the Institute for German, European and International Family Law at the University of Bonn. She studied law in Hamburg, Geneva and Freiburg. She received an LL.M. at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1986 and 1987, she worked as consultant to the Federal Trade Commission, Washington, D.C. and was admitted to the New York bar in 1987. In 1991, she received her doctorate degree at the University of Freiburg, where she subsequently completed her habilitation with a work on the "Europeanization of Competition Law" ("Europaisierung des Wettbewerbsrechts"). Since 2001, she researches and teaches at the University of Bonn, having turned down invitations from the University of Hamburg and the University of Lausanne. From 2006 to 2008, she was ad hoc judge at the European Court of Human Rights.She is member of the Standige Deputation (standing deputation) of the Association of German Jurists, the board of the International Society of Family Law, as well member of the American Law Institute, the Commission on European Family Law and the Academia Europaea. She has published extensively on comparative and international family law.From October 2012 until September 2013, she was Fellow at the Kate Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture", researching on the topic "The European Marriage - optional law for international couples", before she assumed the post of Assistant Director of the Center in October 2013.