Book Review Co-ordinating family expectations Shahar Lifshitz* Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University *Corresponding author. E-mail: Shahar.Lifshitz@biu.ac.il doi:10.1017/S1744552319000156 In the third chapter of her book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization, Daphna Hacker addresses three challenges that emerge from the encounter between ‘Eastern-religious and gender-specific’ and ‘Western-secular and formally gender-equal’ family-law systems. The first arises when individuals ask that a legal act based on religious family law performed in one country be recog- nised in another country where secular family law is in effect. Hacker analyses this type of case through the prism of private international law. She notes the absence of a global system of international private legal rules as a main source of difficulty in matching the expectations of spouses in such cases. She addresses a particular difficulty related to the ethical reluctance of Western countries to recognise cer- tain types of marriage and divorce practised in non-Western countries, such as polygamous marriages. The second challenge arises when individuals ask a civil legal system of a Western country in which they live to recognise, or at least to consider, the validity of a religious act. With regard to this type of case, Hacker presents the attempts of Western countries, such as England, to help women in religious marriages not officially recognised by the state achieve a religious divorce, without which they find themselves bound in a religious marriage contracted according to their faith, even if they were divorced according to civil law. Hacker sees these cases as an example of the difficulty that secular Western legal systems face in creating ‘monistic’ systems of marriage and divorce law that ignore the significance of religious marriage for parts of the population. She concludes with a warning that attempts to preserve such uniformity, carried out primarily in the name of women’s equal rights, may paradoxically harm women who find themselves subordinated to unrecognised, subnational fam- ily religious law enforced by unregulated religious bodies. The third challenge emerges when a minority religious group demands, and asks for state recog- nition of, some kind of autonomous family-law system. Hacker analyses two examples where religious communities in Canada and England sought to use arbitration law to obtain jurisdiction for the reli- gious tribunals they established. She describes civil secular opposition to the possibility of the civil sys- tem granting legal validity to referral to religious tribunals and a legislative amendment in Ontario, Canada, that ruled out the possibility of enforcing an arbitration agreement based on religious prin- ciples in the field of family law. A different attempt to handle the issue arose in England, where a pro- posed law allows disqualification of such arbitration clauses on the basis of gender inequality. Based on Zee’s(2014) early writing, Hacker presents various options the state has in the matter of religious legal regulation, which she classifies as allowing, ignoring and prohibiting. She analyses the meaning of each strategy pertaining to the relationship between the civil state and the religious tribu- nals. At the normative level, Hacker discusses the transformative accommodation developed by Shachar (2001). A model that seeks to avoid a dichotomous approach to the issue of judicial pluralism might allocate jurisdiction over the family matters of members of a minority community between the religious and state institutions based on the issue at hand. For example, it might refer marriage and divorce to religious tribunals and property relations to a secular civil court. As a precondition for a partial recognition of the judicial autonomy of the religious community, the model requires freedom of both spouses to choose between the religious and secular alternatives, and the commitment of the religious court to the principle of gender equality. Despite basic sympathy for the proposed model, Hacker doubts the ability to avoid the ambiguity stemming from the need to examine whether the © Cambridge University Press 2019 International Journal of Law in Context 223 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744552319000156 Published online by Cambridge University Press