Posts
Seeing invisible elephants – the transparency review is published
The President’s Transparency Review has finally concluded. After a period long enough to gestate both an elephant and a human baby consecutively, was it worth the wait? Our response is an emphatic ‘Yes’. The president has both acknowledged the massive, weighty,...
Defining expertise
There has been a lot of discussion recently about experts in the family court, prompted partly as a result of the recent publication of a 'memorandum' on the topic by the President of the Family Division, and partly as a result of some recent press coverage relating...
Slam dunk?
This post is by Delia Minoprio. We asked Delia to look at a news article we saw in the Liverpool Echo, and to consider it alongside the judgment in the case it related to. Let me start with a confession: I’m a family law barrister and I feel a little embarrassed by it...
Transparency Tidbits
When we heard that the President was coming to give a speech at the FLBA conference this weekend we wondered if he might use it to launch the Transparency Review Report. In fact, he didn't, but he did confirm that the review will be published on Thursday 28 October as...
Parental Alienation – what can we tell from published judgments?
Parental alienation (PA) is a controversial subject on which there are widely polarised views, making it difficult to write about in a way that doesn’t attract criticism from some quarter. There were a batch of PA judgments (all about the same family) published...
Reporting on Financial Remedy cases
This is the text of a speech given by journalist Louise Tickle delivered at the At A Glance Conference in London on 13 October 2021, reproduced with kind permission. I’ve never reported on a financial remedy case. I’ve never been in a hearing about one either. ...
Reporting Financial Remedies Cases: The Journalist’s View – A Paper by Sir James Munby
This is the text of a speech delivered at the at the At A Glance Conference in London on 13 October 2021, reproduced with kind thanks to Sir James Munby. I am a mere lawyer. I am neither a reporter nor a journalist, though we will shortly be hearing from a...
More on the Sheikh story
In March 2020, we wrote about the extraordinary family court proceedings involving the two children of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai and his sixth wife, Princess Haya bint Al Hussein. One of the most interesting aspects was that the Sheikh did not...
When Worlds – and Words – collide
I’m on holiday in Greece when I hear about a case involving a mother who has taken her children some 10 hours travel-time from the family home, without their father’s knowledge or consent. It’s a case that involves allegations of domestic abuse, a father who admits he...
An example of a family court judgment where the parties are named
We've spotted an interesting decision from last month where a High Court Judge has published a judgment in connection with a jurisdictional dispute arising from a husband's nullity petition, along with the names of both parties. The husband contended the wife's...