Posts

Police hunt for mother who has abducted her own children – what on earth is going on?
[Update 6 April 2017: The BBC report that Samantha Baldwin and the children have been found safely. There is no further information available at present and we now expect things to go quiet in terms of information coming from the police / Family Court, at least for a...
McKenzie Pets
Legal Support Animals to be aloud in court In a new initiative proposed by two junior researchers in Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), litigants in person may soon be allowed to bring their pets into court to help them present their case. Legal...
Why family law needs reform now (or not)
MP Suella Fernandes has written a plea for wide ranging reform of family law in The Times (paywall) : Why family law needs reform now She asks for reform of the law in terms of child arrangements when parents separate, asking for better enforcement, a 3...

Family Court Reporting Watch: Weekly Round Up
Correcting, clarifying or commenting on media reports of family court cases Explaining or commenting on published Judgments of family court cases Highlighting other transparency news MEDIA REPORTS OF FAMILY COURTS CASES / FAMILY JUSTICE ISSUES ...
Transparency on Radio 4
Radio 4 covered the topic of transparency last week, following publication of research by Cardiff University about the impact of the 2014 guidance on publication of judgments. Both Chair Lucy Reed and Dr Doughty (one of the researchers and a member of TP) featured....
Unreasonable behaviour, unreasonable judges or unreasonable law?
Actually, the first of those is a misnomer - as we explored in an earlier post the law on divorce in England & Wales requires behaviour (maybe unreasonable, maybe not) on the one part of a spouse that means it is unreasonable to now expect the other to continue...
Important new research published today on the Transparency Guidance for publication of Family Court judgments
The research, led by Dr Julie Doughty of Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics, examines how the Transparency Guidance on publication of family court judgments has taken effect since February 2014 and its impact. Summary Here is a helpful four page...

Family Court Reporting Watch: Weekly Round Up
Correcting, clarifying or commenting on media reports of family court cases Explaining or commenting on published Judgments of family court cases Highlighting other transparency news MEDIA REPORTS OF FAMILY COURTS CASES / FAMILY JUSTICE ISSUES The...
‘The truly pitiful plight of a mother caught up in drug addiction’: Publishing judgments from ‘ordinary’ family court decisions
Before new guidance from February 2014 (the Transparency Guidance), it was extremely rare for a judgment from a ‘routine’ family court case, outside of the High Court, raising no point of particular legal interest, to be placed in the public domain by being published...
Complaint to The Telegraph
We wrote about Christopher Booker's recent piece : In Britain's secretive family courts, the lawyers always win, in a blog post : Just add this one to the pile… We've now followed this up with a complaint to The Telegraph via their complaints procedure. We will...