How do family courts use ‘barring orders’?

by Julie Doughty | Jun 9, 2019 | Cases, Explanation, FCReportingWatch

One of the tasks of the new review of family courts and domestic abuse announced last month by the MoJ is to examine courts’ use of barring orders. (By the way, we don’t know when the three months for the review starts, although we are now three weeks in from...

How does the family court deal with domestic abuse? A snapshot – Part 2

by Sophie Smith Holland | Jun 7, 2019 | Analysis, Cases, Explanation, FCReportingWatch

This is Part 2. You can read Part 1 here. A (A Child) [2019] EWFC B16 (12 March 2019) In this case, the court was making a final decision in care proceedings. The decision to be made was whether a child could be cared for by both of his parents, just his mother...

How does the family court deal with domestic abuse? A snapshot

by Sophie Smith Holland | Jun 7, 2019 | Analysis, Cases, Comment, Explanation

This is a first post from Sophie Smith-Holland, one of our new contributors. Sophie tweets as @SSmithHolland. The post is divided into two parts. This is Part One. The question of how the Family Court deals with domestic abuse has had a huge amount of public...

Do social workers have a duty of care to protect children of local authority tenants?

by Julie Doughty | Jun 6, 2019 | Cases, Explanation

You can tell this was likely to be an important case because there are five ‘interverners’ – organisations that have an interest, in principle, in the outcome – in this particular case, from a human rights and children’s rights perspective. The applicants were two...

Money, money, money, must be funny, in an [anonymised beneficiary’s] world: protecting child beneficiaries in variation of trust cases

by Paul M | Jun 1, 2019 | Analysis, Cases, Explanation, FCReportingWatch

A typical plot development in old novels is the sudden discovery of unexpected wealth, usually in the form of an inheritance, or the discovery of a long lost will or hidden relationship to a wealthy benefactor.   That is sometimes what it...

Legal blogging by consent

by Lucy R | May 30, 2019 | Cases, Explanation, FCReportingWatch, Legal blogging

On 10 May I attended the Family Court to see if I could attend a hearing under the Legal Blogging Pilot before heading off to collecting judgment in one of my cases at noon. I wasn’t sure that this would be very productive because of the fact I could only fit in a...