The Fragmentation of Parental Rights

Abstract

It is now eight years since J. C. Hall and J. Eekelaar called for a “reformation” and “clarification” of parental rights. Both of them established, in rather different ways, the difficulty in analysing parental rights as rights rather than as duties or powers or freedoms, the ascendancy in any case of the welfare of the child in almost every example where a parental right came into conflict with the welfare principle, and finally the difficulty of describing the fragmentation of parental rights when these are split up between different people or bodies.