This book, by one of the UK's leading scholars of welfare law, analyzes the current UK child support legislation in its broader historical and social context, synthesizing both doctrinal and socio-legal approaches to legal research and scholarship. The book draws on the historical and legal literature on the Poor Law and the development of both the public and private law obligation of child maintenance. Modern child support law must also be considered in the context of both social and demographic changes and in the light of popular norms about child maintenance liabilities. The book is...