conference on Gender, Family Responsibility and Legal Change at the University of Sussex, where I enjoyed listening to papers and discussions on a range of fascinating issues surrounding responsibilities in families in all their varied forms. Some of those papers – fully revised, updated, and refined – appear in this volume; others will appear in its companion volume, Regulating Family Responsibilities, forthcoming. My focus in this foreword will be on an encounter I had with a particular shift in the law’s recognition of family responsibilities. I have twice had my photograph in the New York Times. The first time I was swathed in white bandages, sitting up in a hospital bed in London after the bomb attack that took my arm in 1988 (Sachs, A. 1990. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. London: Grafton Books). The second time I was wearing a green robe, a judge in the Constitutional Court of South Africa, about to give judgment in what is commonly known as the same-sex marriages case (Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie 2006 (1) SA 524 (CC), Fourie v Minister of Home Affairs 2005 (3) BCLR 241 (SCA), 2005 (3) SA 429 (SCA)). As you can imagine there was enormous international interest in the case. This photograph subsequently appeared on the cover of my book (written whilst a Ford Foundation’s Scholar in Residence) The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law (2009, Oxford: Oxford University Press). The subject of that book, my focus in this Foreword, and what many of the participants in this conference, Gender, Family Responsibility and Legal Change, have been considering, is the transforming effect of law upon life, and upon family life, in particular.