Posts
A new case on the ‘shaken baby’ problem
TP and TS [2019] EWHC B51 concerns baby twins who had been born prematurely at 31 weeks and who subsequently experienced serious physical trauma that may have been attributable to their parents. The good news is that the court has arrived at a conclusion that the...
News from the latest Cafcass Open Board Meeting: Thoughts from the new CEO
Cafcass hold two board meetings in public each year to promote transparency, engagement and trust. They normally alternate between topic based and ordinary working board meetings held in public. This time they held back their open meeting to Wednesday 9th...
The mystery of the missing Minutes (or… minutes turn into hours and into months…)
Being slightly geeky, we like to follow the minutes of meetings of the Family Procedure Rule Committee, particularly since our request to the committee to consider implementing a legal blogging pilot, the progress of which we were able to track through consecutive (if...
No take-backs? The parents who changed their mind about adoption and the local authority who got it very, very wrong
Malvika Jaganmohan is a pupil barrister at Coram Chambers, a specialist family law chambers in London. She tweets as @MalvikaJaganmo1 All paragraph references in bold refer to the judgment which is publicly available on Bailii. Background The case of Foster...
‘The problems are huge’: teenagers in care living in caravan parks
HHJ Dancey explains at the outset of this case, Dorset Council v A (Residential Placement: Lack of Resources) [2019] EWFC 62 that he has spoken to A, aged 15, about his intention to 'tell her story' and that he is writing the judgment with her and her family reading...
Tafida Raqeeb Judgment Summary: Continuation of Life-Sustaining Treatment in Italy held to be in Child’s Best Interests
This is a guest post from Transparency Project member, Emma Nottingham and Peta Coulson-Smith (Paediatric Registrar, and Clinical Training Fellow & Senior Teaching Fellow in Clinical Ethics and Law at the University of Southampton). Peta tweets as @drpetacs. This...
The deprivation of liberty for 16 and 17 year olds
We are very pleased to bring this Guest Post very kindly written by Victoria Butler-Cole QC, barrister at 39 Essex Chambers. Victoria tweets at @TorButlerCole We have previously written a post here which gives a brief outline of this case. This post goes into further...
Transgender man must remain registered as child’s mother
In the case of TT, R (On the Application Of) v The Registrar General for England and Wales [2019] EWHC 2384 (Fam) (25 September 2019) the court was asked to determine the definition of ‘mother’ under the law in England and Wales. The individual in the case was...
BAILII and the re-use of judgments as public legal information
For all practical purposes, the free legal database run by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) is an official source of judgments from senior courts that any member of the public or any journalist can use. But while anyone can read individual...
Off to IPSO we go…(hey ho)
On 27 August the Express published an article under their 'crusade' to 'End this injustice' (in family courts). We were concerned that it contained serious inaccuracies and was misleading. We wrote about that in a post on 30 August : The Danger of Crusades. On 1...