Law is not enough! - The mutations of the access to family and children law and justice in Portugal

Abstract

Confronted with new scenarios, shaped under the signs of flexibility, fluidity and plurality, family and child law is called upon to answer to new questions, still indeterminate and undefined, that manifest themselves inside a two-fold dynamics – privatization and deinstitutionalization of family relations, on one hand, and (re)publicness, on the other. These transformative speeds – one rapid and one more moderate, respectively family and family regulation – are accompanied of a third one, moving at a slower pace – the system of access to family and child law and justice, without which effectiveness of rights cannot be guaranteed and citizenship cannot be fully exercised.