Excerpt India’s Supreme Court ruled that family benefits under the law must be extended to blended families, same-sex couples and other households it considers “atypical.” It is the latest in a series of court decisions to challenge the country’s conservative mores, and it could have major implications for the rights of women and gay people. The court ruled in favor of a nurse whose employer denied her application for maternity leave because she had already taken leave to care for her husband’s children from a previous marriage. “The concept of a ‘family’ both in the law and in society is that it consists of a single, unchanging unit with a mother and a father (who remain constant over time) and their children,” the two-judge bench said in the decision. D.Y. Chandrachud, the justice who wrote the order, said, “This assumption ignores the fact that many families do not conform to this expectation.” Background: Family issues often pit unmarried parents against extended families in length...