Posts
‘Are you here because of the significant failure?’
As it happens I wasn't, and the lawyer who asked me this had assumed wrongly. I was attending court just to see what was on that day, and to use the legal blogging pilot to try to report a typical day in the life of a circuit judge. But I'd stumbled upon a case where,...
Ordinary heartbreak
This post is about a hearing I attended recently as a legal blogger. I wrote about the overall experience that day here. This hearing was a case management hearing in a care case. Although such cases are private and I would not normally be permitted to write publicly...
The four corners of legal blogging
Recently I found myself with a day free of hearings or pressing work, and decided to spend it legal blogging. The night before the hearing I took a look at the court lists, and identified one with several shortish hearings that (based on the case number and...
President’s guidance as to reporting on family courts
As part of the decision made by the President of the Family Division in the appeal by TP member, Louise Tickle in February, Sir Andrew McFarlane stated that guidance to courts would need to be issued to address the uncertainty that existed if a journalist or legal...
Accuracy enthusiasts ban dodgy headlines – journalist blasts sub-editors for lie that made it around the world before the truth had got its boots on
Last Wednesday, the Mail and the Sun published an article about a father who had just withdrawn from eight years of family court litigation. This man had been trying to re-establish his relationship with his children. His ex, the judge explained in a published...
Nuffield Family Justice Observatory: Supporting better outcomes for children through research
Some readers may remember the 'research-led family justice system' envisaged in the Norgrove Family Justice Review in 2011. However, we're still waiting and, as Sir James Munby explained in this interview, family court professionals can sometimes feel that they are...
New writers join the project team
This blog post originally appeared as our monthly column in the September 2019 issue of Family Law at [2019] Fam Law 1074(1). New writers join the project team In this month's column, we feature some contributions by writers who have recently become involved in the...
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...