Divorcing Traditions

Katherine Lemons, Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism (Cornell University, 2019).

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. 

-Publisher's Description

The Best Interests of the Child: The Least Detrimental Alternative

Joseph Goldstein, Albert J. Solnit, Sonja Goldstein & Anna Freud (Yale University). The Best Interests of the Child (Free Press, 1996 edition).

"The authors speak in one voice in concluding that the continuity of care--continuity of a child's relationship with his or her adult caregiver--is a universal essential to the child's well-being. To this end, they stress that minimizing intrusions by the law is paramount to safeguarding the child's growth and development. 'The least detrimental alternative'--the authors' overarching guideline for assuring the continuity of the psychological parent-child relationship--has been cited in more than a thousand child custody cases since 1973."
—Book jacket