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The Swedish chapter of this Handbook aims to summarize and critically analyze relevant law and practice in Sweden as of early 2024 concerning social parenthood, a topic being investigated in light of EU-level efforts to harmonize or otherwise minimize discrimination against certain EU citizens, be they parents or children, due to the social instead of traditional biological basis of their parent-child relationship.

It analyzes the Swedish legal concepts of parenthood, family, social parenthood and de facto parenthood, how parenthood is established (by automatic operation of Swedish law, by consent or intention such as in situations of confirmation of parentage, adoption, and medically-assisted reproduction) as well as ways that current law and its application, including in cross-border cases such as those in which recognition of foreign-issued parenthood-related documents is sought, can lead to discrimination and its negative consequences for children and parents.    

As the Handbook's Policy Recommendations explain,

"Social parenthood is an umbrella term used to describe the relationship between a person assuming parental status or parental responsibility anda child, in the absence of a genetic, biological, and gestational contribution between the former and the latter. The category includes all forms offiliation resulting from the various types of adoption, including stepchildadoption, as well as filiation resulting from donor-gamete-based medically-assisted reproduction, medically-assisted procreation (MAP) using acouple’s own gametes, surrogacy, post-mortem procreation (use of gametes after a natural parent’s death), adoption of embryos, and heterologousMAP by mistake (switched gametes at the lab resulting in a child not biologically related to the intended parents).

"Social parenthood further includes functional/de facto parenthoodby adults in actual parenting roles with a child and parenthood foundedon informed consent more generally. In the free-movement context, itincludes cases in which certain countries provide legal status to a parentchild relationship while in other states the parent and child are treated as“legal strangers”.

"By including the concept of social parenthood in legal regulation of thefamily, such legal harms can be avoided and more emphasis can be placedon what is central for the child: enduring care for the development of theidentity of the child, in coordination with the document “EU strategyon the rights of the child”. The approach is supported by research findings from the studied jurisdictions that document existing rules of domestic law aimed at the preservation of a social parent-child relationship, thatis to say a non-biological status filiationis for the protection of the bestinterest of the child. The term is highly relevant to EU legal developmentbecause it includes both the above-described non-biologically-based formsof parenthood/filiation based on national law and the filiation status thatcirculates between EU Member States and in cross-border cases between EU and non-EU countries." 

This chapter provides family law experts worldwide with a glimpse into and an update on the latest changes in European family law, specifically to conflict of law rules for resolving European Union (EU) cross-border family law cases and most notably those regarding responsibility for children, marital dissolution and distribution of assets after death. Examined are EU-level legal developments affecting cross-border family relationships within the 27 nations of the European Union that have been introduced primarily through significant new EU legislation and by recent case decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The changes’ impacts at the national-law level on substantive and procedural family law and on national and personal (party) autonomy are illustrated using reports on the experiences across the EU. The experience of my own Member State, Sweden, is described as an example of how EU-level, increasingly harmonised family law (‘international private law’ primarily) is being negotiated and implemented both between and within EU Member States. This research aims to overview ongoing (and indeed ever-present) tensions between autonomy and uniformity interests within the EU, contributing to the significant existing literature on the present state of and future possibilities for ‘European family law’ while also introducing non-EU scholars to this growing, rather complex legal area. As the chapter’s final sections describe, a steadily-increasing Europeanisation of family law is observed, co-existing with the tensions, which is reducing legal difficulties for individuals and state actors in Sweden and throughout the EU within a broader context of ongoing legal, economic and cultural globalisation. Family law, no longer taking a back seat to other EU legal areas, is today playing a remarkably prominent role.

The chapter contains five sections, beginning with an introduction. Section 2 describes legal education and the law program in Sweden generally, while Section 3 specifies the curricular requirements all law teaching in Sweden (and the US) must follow. Section 4 describes specifically Swedish family and child law teaching, beginning with how academics in Sweden (and the US) define "family law's" scope. Finally, Section 5 analyzes Swedish family and child law pedagogy’s strengths and remaining challenges considering its educational aims and practical realities. Concluding comments express (1) optimism for recent developments in Swedish family and child law teaching design; (2) concern that published aims (and even requirements) are nonetheless not yet fully and consistently met, although we know how they could be; and (3) a call to further action, especially in light of the ongoing shifts legally, socially and politically being experienced by today's law students' generation. Specifically, I propose that further infusing current legal and sociolegal research into the teaching and deepening the extent to which students encounter critical perspectives on the law could further improve the teaching’s effectiveness and adherence to national standards.

The identification and protection of children's interests and rights, even when they may conflict with those of their parents, has long been one aim of family law. Many progressive jurisdictions more broadly have been enacting a legal conception of children as independent legal subjects and rights-holders whose distinct interests and views in matters concerning them legally must be sought and prioritised to a greater extent than before. Partially as a result of this, Swedish and Californian family laws today both grant children conditional yet increasingly mandatory rights to participate in child custody conflicts between their parents. Children have the right to express their own views relevant to custody and visitation decisions, and to have those views given consideration and due weight by courts determining what is in their best interests.These rights are justified differently in the two jurisdictions examined here, largely reflecting the strong children's rights focus in Sweden and the strong parents' rights tradition in the US. Both systems nonetheless deem giving the child an opportunity to participate in family law matters as supportive of children's autonomy interests and necessary to the best interests determination process. Both thus protect children's participation rights in family law matters within child custody law. This chapter argues that Sweden and California fail to justify why similar rights do not exist within child support law and proposes remedying this by similarly extending children's participation rights into child support decisions.

Ensuring just distribution of and adequate funding for children whose parents do not live together is a global legal challenge. It affects many families as well as every legal jurisdiction’s welfare state and family law.

This comparative study describes child support legal solutions in two jurisdictions, California (a liberal welfare state) and Sweden (a social democratic one). Analyzed are the similarities and differences in these states’ legal responses to the inequalities child support law functions to alleviate, and the implications for child support theory and practice in these and other jurisdictions.

Micro-comparative chapters demonstrate how the jurisdictions’ regulations differ by analyzing children’s rights and needs and parents’ duties and abilities to pay, each as defined in the child support law. Also compared are procedural laws enforcing child support rights and duties in private and public law cases.

Macro-comparative chapters draw a comparative portrait of two welfare state ideological and family law child support approaches, both aiming to reduce inequalities, in terms of how their child support laws and welfare states have defined and addressed the best interests of children and society at large.

Most of the differences in the laws and their interpretations are found to reflect the welfare state ideals of the two societies including their ideal models of the family and of individuals’ relationships to the state. Ideals for judicial and negotiated family law conflict resolution also play a significant role.

Analyses of the differences include comparison of the jurisdictions’ (1) histories, (2) legal principles and traditions, (3) gender equality ideals and realities and (4) income equality ideals and realities, all as related to legal child support rights and duties.

The study provides a better understanding of some of the weaknesses within these regulations, and also of the child support system design choices they represent. Weaknesses in child support laws arise not just from confusions over how to prioritize conflicting interests directly regulated by the legal rules, but also how to prioritize those interests given conflicting ideals of the state and the family, both between and within these societies. Despite the different ideals influencing both systems’ solutions, elements of each jurisdiction’s experience have potential to inform the other’s further development. 

This comparative review briefly presents the legal positions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and of the Swedish, Norwegian and American legal systems with respect to parental corporal punishment of children (CP), then outlines and compares the available remedies and enforcement in practice when incidents of CP occur in each of the three countries.

‘Corporal’ punishment, for the purposes of this chapter, x2019 a physical touching of a child for the purpose of correcting the child's behaviour. In the term ‘parental ‘we include biological and adoptive parents and step-parents, but exclude consideration of violence committed by other caregivers or guardians, also to limit the scope of discussion.

In the past century many legal regulators have moved from viewing ‘mild’ CP of children as a parental right or even duty to viewing it as a harmful and abusive practice. In a growing number of jurisdictions – including Sweden and Norway but not the United States – CP is now a crime.

With this comparison, we test our hypothesis that actual legal consequences for various types of parental behaviour that can be defined as CP do not differ as starkly as one might initially expect when one knows only that CP of children is criminally punishable in Sweden and in Norway but lawful in all 50 states of the United States. We find this true to an extent, yet also describe significant differences in state actions taken when CP occurs in Sweden and Norway compared to in the US, including compensatory damages paid to children and potential criminal conviction of offending parents or removal of the child from the home. These consequences correlate with a much higher rate of CP occurring in the US than in these two Scandinavian countries today. We conclude with brief comments on the implications of our findings.

Because of the widespread international approval of the UN's CRC, we begin with its position on the proper legal regulation of parents ‘behaviour as they guide the upbringing of their children, specifically its position on disciplinary practices collectively known as CP, then summarise the three studied countries’ approaches to CP regulation.

This chapter describes several of the author's experiences as a 2012-2013 visiting law lecturer in Umeå's law department with her experiences during her own legal education and exposure to problem-based learning (PBL) and the case law method in the United States.