1. INTRODUCTION

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.

Eekelaar’s grasp of the need for lawmakers to understand the social context within which the law was operating led him to go on to conduct many important empirical studies, often in collaboration with Mavis Maclean. She came from a background in social policy rather than law. This reflected another insight which was apparent in Family Security and Family Breakdown: that family law should not be seen in isolation from other areas of law which impacted upon the everyday lives of ordinary families, in particular the social policies adopted by the welfare state, in housing, welfare benefits and child protection. Eekelaar also stated his belief that lawmakers should have some understanding of what the public themselves believed would be fair – what were their views of the values which should underpin family life and family law? This led to another rich strand in his scholarship. A third strand was comparative law. The International Society of Family Law was founded in 1973, as ‘an independent, international, scholarly association dedicated to the study, research and discussion of family law and related disciplines’. Eekelaar has played a large part in the Association and its conferences, and for several decades was co-editor of the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family.