Posts
Vulnerable Clients and The Family Justice System
Should a disability prevent someone being a good parent? Is vulnerability the same as disability? What does the family justice system do to protect the rights of the disabled person to be a parent and of the child to be adequately parented? How can a vulnerable parent...
Hidden transparency
We've been waiting, hawk-like, since 2014 for the 'next steps' in transparency reform. And when it came we almost missed it, hidden like a tiny rodent camouflaged under a bush. The President's View number 18 was published last week. It is all about new arrangements...
Legal help and advice to tell you how to get advice
Clarity: legal aid law and access to rights The legal aid scheme has a central irony. Lord Bingham’s first rule of his Rule of Law was that ‘The law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable’ (The Rule of Law Tom Bingham, 2010 at...
Pianos and Prisons and Publication of Judgments
On 20 January the Daily Mail headline demanded : 'Family court judge must explain why pianist jailed, says campaigner' The campaigner was ex-MP John Hemming. The piano man was, we thought, a father whose protests on social media we had seen before, and in respect of...
Expert evidence about unexplained injuries in child protection cases
On 10 January, the Daily Mail reported about the alarming case of a baby named Teddy, who was removed from his parents' care when just six-weeks old, and remained away from them for five months while there was investigation into the causes of bruising on his face and...
Pragmatism versus Principle
We wrote back in January last year about a case where Mr Justice Peter Jackson (now in the Court of Appeal) had ruled against direct contact between children raised in an ultra-orthodox (Charedi) Jewish community and their transgender father, in essence because in...
‘All is not well with child protection in North Wales’
This observation was made by HHJ Gareth Jones in Wrexham Family Court in March 2017, in a judgment Re E [2017] EWFC 101 published in January 2018. HHJ Jones is a transparency hero – he is the only judge in Wales whose judgments regularly appear on BAILII, in...
Family Court Reporting Watch Roundup
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 (MIS)REPORTS OF FAMILY COURT CASES The Daily Mail - Polly Morgan commented on...
Monetary Madness Misreporting
I’m sorry to report that today’s Daily Mail article ‘The tick box divorce: Couples will fill in new ten-page online form detailing money and assets they want under plans to streamline the system’ is (to use a technical legal term) totes nonsense. I exaggerate. The...
Is the law becoming meaner to the poorer spouse?
There was an interesting article in The Times last week, ‘Is there such a thing as a good divorce? (paywall), written by Grania Langdon-Down. It was a bit of a hodge-podge of different concepts, but one bit I did find interesting was the suggestion that courts are...