Bailii

Posted on | January 18, 2012 | 1 Comment

A long time ago I promised I would do my bit to help BAILII raise funds. And then I forgot about it.

I have now made good on my promise and gift aided 5% of the funds I have raised through advertising on Pink Tape to BAILII. Not a fortune, but it’s better than a poke in the eye.

This seems like a good opportunity to remind others that BAILII do struggle for funds, and that they are hugely important to the legal blogging community and more broadly in terms of access to justice.

If you run a blog that links to BAILII, or if you are a lawyer that relies upon BAILII for transcripts – ask your chambers, firm, boss – yourself – if you could donate something.

You could also do their online survey.

Go on.

Go on gowahn gowahn gowahn gowahn

Go-wan.

Well, you did ask

Posted on | January 16, 2012 | 6 Comments

This is a funny sort of book review. I’m not going to tell you the name of the book or the author. It is in fact an anonymised book review of an already anonymised book which was ghost written on behalf of a father previously involved in lengthy family court proceedings in the County and High Courts. The book tells the story of his relationship, the birth of his son, the breakdown of that relationship and ensuing battles both in and out of court. Ultimately, awesomely lengthy proceedings result in alienation of child from father. However if I told you the name of the book or the pseudonym of the author I’d have to kill you. And we wouldn’t want that. So I’m going to call him Mr Pseudonym.

I have been hounded repeatedly for this review by the representative of what appears to be some self publishing promotional service employed by Mr Pseudonym  - have I read it yet, would I like to interview the author, can he write me a guest post? So lady, here’s the review. And thanks but no thanks to the other stuff.

First of all let me explain why I’m not going to tell you the name of the book or the Mr Pseudonym’s pseudonym. The reasons are fourfold:

1. I wouldn’t do such a thing to you, my loyal readers. If you knew what it was called I fear you would feel compelled to seek it out. You would thank me, if only you could understand just how excruciating a read it was. If there wasn’t already a law against it (see 3) I would be saying there should be.
2. Whilst I am not shy of saying what I think, I have no particular desire to publicly humiliate another human being, let alone one self evidently suffering from the anguish of a lengthy and acrimonious family dispute, and the loss of a child.
3. Whilst it may have escaped the author, the publisher (a US self publishing house) and the many many international distributors who are offering this book for sale online (Amazon, WHSmith, Barnes & Noble to name but a few), there are (as I see it) some legal problems with the publication of this book. Of which more below.
4. Even if I’m wrong about the legal problems I am uncomfortable with the extent to which the privacy of the ex Mrs Pseudonym and the parties’ child is being invaded, and the possible impact this book might have on them were it to become known to them. I want no part in that. Sadly, this limits the extent to which I am able to quote the more exquisitely awful passages.

Continue reading “Well, you did ask” »

Statistically Speaking

Posted on | January 15, 2012 | 1 Comment

Last week a range of quarterly court statistics were published by the MoJ. The condensed version of the summary is that care is up massively and everything else is down (not so as you’d know it to hear the government bang on about all those unnecessary and ever-escalating interminable private law disputes).

But what I thought was quite interesting was the table showing the breakdown as between individual courts (the file labelled Family courts and mediation (CSV) in the right hand column), not least because my own local court (Bristol) sits despondently towards the bottom of the league in terms of speedy resolution of care proceedings, with around 2/3 taking longer than 50 weeks to complete. On average 50% of cases are completed within 50 weeks. In Bristol it is 33%. The average duration of care proceedings in England & Wales is 55 weeks; in Bristol it is 75 weeks. Extrapolating from the figures, it appears that 6% of cases take more than 80 weeks to complete. I can account for at least one of those.

There is an enormous amount of data, and it’s difficult without spending hours poring over it to see a pattern that helps us understand why care cases take so long in Bristol. It seems to me that there are a number of possible explanations, apart from the loquaciousness of those of us practising our advocacy skills there: Bristol has a large contingent of private law children cases, although in fairness other courts with a lot of private law business manage better average case durations for public work. What we aren’t able to add into the mix, and what I think are crucial, are the judicial numbers. Bristol has only 3 family Circuit Judges (two of whom sit in civil / crime) and only 2 (I think) district judges ticketed for care. Listing is a real difficulty, but this also applies to other courts. The geography and spread of other courts in a region impacts upon the complexity and nature of cases which arrive at the door of a care centre. Bristol is the receiving court for many transfers up from outlying FPCs, and is the only court within my regular stomping ground to house more than one family CJ.

There are any number of other factors which might bear upon the meaning of these figures. The raw data is interesting but not much use. I hope that somebody somewhere is busily analysing these figures, placing them in the context of the different demands upon and resources available to individual courts, and trying to draw some useful conclusions about what is making some courts more speedy than others (someone assisting Ryder J is doing just this one hopes). I for one would really like to know if we are doing something different in our neck of the woods, or if it is just external pressures which have inevitably resulted in poorer timescales. I don’t think there is any material difference in case management practice between Bristol and other courts I’m familiar with, although they all have their quirks.

Thoughts?

You have a gazillion unread emails

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | 5 Comments

When I see something interesting on twitter or tinternet I email myself a link. This happens a lot when I’m busy – I snatch five minutes to mess around on the interweb but have no time to read that interesting article or blog post. And often that kitkat time is somewhere with a dodgy signal so I see a tantalising tweet and spent an age trying to load the article it is referring to.

The upshot is an inbox full of emails that I make a conscious effort to lead marked as unread until they are read and discarded or read and acted upon (for example by incorporation into a blog post). This is efficient but anxiety provoking. I cannot stand having unread mail. That little red circle on my iphone burns a hole in my handbag: “7 unread messages. 7 unread messages. 8 unread messages. 10 unread messages”. It cannot be ignored. It is an easy task left undone.

And so I need to purge. Today I have a number of unread emails (not to mention a multitude of browser tabs). All of which I have sent myself by way of masochistic self-reminder. Humour me (in reverse chronological order): Continue reading “You have a gazillion unread emails” »

Guest Post: Social media – our master or our servant?

Posted on | January 11, 2012 | 3 Comments

This is a guest post written by Sarah Phillimore (@svphillimore), a barrister at St John’s Chambers. It arises from a discussion Sarah, myself and other colleagues had last weekend about the difficulty in obtaining s26 contact orders in placement proceedings and the spate of media reports of teenagers tracked down on Facebook by their biological family, not always with a happy ending.

Social media – our master or our servant?

I dimly remember being a teenager. It was not a great time. It would have been much worse if I had been adopted and on top of my hormonal struggles to come to terms with my place in the world, I then had to cope with the sudden discovery via Facebook that numerous members of my biological family wanted to get in touch and share their perspective about why I was adopted.

 

The human part of me feels compassion for the families who have had to face this; in some cases the fall out from such sudden reintroduction to the birth family has been massive and children have decided to move out of their adopted homes. But the less compassionate, lawyer part of me says ‘good’. Because perhaps now we can kick start more debate about post adoption direct contact. We can’t have a blanket assumption that such contact is either good or bad as each case involves a multiplicity of complicated facts and a variety of different people. Direct contact involves a dynamic relationship between people that changes over time. However, if there is now a serious risk of haphazard and unstructured post adoption contact being facilitated through the medium of social networking sites, we need to decide how we deal with that situation and our decisions should be based on good evidence.

 

The last 50 years have seen enormous shifts in societal attitudes towards accepting different concepts of ‘family’. Adoption is no longer a mechanism to cover up a shameful indiscretion and to encourage adopted children to vanish without trace into their ‘new’ family. There is recognition of the likely strength of our curiosity about our origins and the pull of the blood tie.

 

According to the Adoption Information Line, 70% of children adopted are between 1 -4 years. Only a very few are under 1 or over 10. The numbers of children adopted each year have decreased significantly from about 21,000 in 1975 to 5,797 in 1995; a reflection of the increased availability of abortion and the societal shift that no longer stigmatises illegitimacy. Adopted children are very unlikely to be brand new babies, given up by desperate teenage girls, but rather older children who have already suffered or were likely to suffer significant harm from their birth parents. We are thus considering a group of children who had a less than ideal start to life, may suffer difficulties with attachment and may retain memories of the harm done to them. It is likely that these children will find it difficult to cope with sudden and unsupported reintroduction to their birth family.

 

Research suggests that ‘communicative openness’ in adoptive families – how they think and talk about adoption – is positively linked to ‘structural openness’ – contact with birth family members – but that children’s emotional and behavioural development was not related to either the type of contact they were having with their birth families or the communicative openness of their adoptive parents (see Post-Adoption contact and Openness in Adoptive Parents’ Minds: Consequences for Children’s Development Elsbeth Neil Br JSoc Work (2009) 39).

 

More research is needed; as Elsbeth Neil recognises ‘finding empirical answers to questions about outcomes of contact after adoption is frustrated by significant methodological challenges …what is meant by contact after adoption? The type, frequency, duration and management of contact all need to be considered, as does the type of birth relative involved.’ Continue reading “Guest Post: Social media – our master or our servant?” »

Mediation Marathon

Posted on | January 6, 2012 | 5 Comments

I’ve just spent the first of six days training to be a family mediator. It’s been daunting but exciting, interesting but exhausting. Tomorrow the role play begins. It must be done. Eyes on the prize an’ all that. However, whilst not overbrimming with enthusiasm for role play, nor for losing my precious weekend to such masochism, I am enthusiastic about the skills I am learning, and to put them to use both in the context of mediation and in my court based work.

 

 

 

The Daily Mail and the Moral Crusade

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 1 Comment

Sir Paul Coleridge may not be on a moral crusade but his Marriage Foundation has certainly inspired the crusading spirit in the Daily Mail (download pdf of article here: It’s down to the judges to mend our divorce laws – they trashed them in the first place By STEVE DOUGHTY if you don’t want to give google juice to the Daily Mail, but if you must see it in situ here is the link).

The Mail’s Steve Doughty has written an article with a true identity crisis. When I read the words “A judge simply cannot launch controversial political campaigns, and particularly not about matters on which she is required to give daily judgements in court.” I thought Coleridge was about to get it in the neck for sticking out his own. But in fact, whilst the judiciary in general are the villains of this piece, Coleridge himself emerges as something of a hero. Steve Doughty begins by reporting the unremarkable fact that the Law Commission is comprised of lawyers:

“Judges have taken the lead in developing family law for 20 years now. It was in the early 1990s that a judicial quango called the Law Commission, which was set up to provide ministers with advice on updating arcane areas of the law, began recommending sweeping reforms for no-fault divorce to take the tears out of family break-up.”

The Law Commission of course advises the Government about Law Reform, and as we all know is often ignored, particularly where family law is concerned. But according to Doughty this has not stopped the judiciary from having their way by hook or by crook:

“It is the judiciary, not elected politicians, who have decided that the courts should take no account of adultery or other marital misbehaviour in divorce cases.

In a business contract, a party that breaks the rules is penalised. In marriage, the most far-reaching and solemn contract anyone can make, as far as the courts are concerned the rules don’t matter.

This is why a man who has to hand over a large slice of his income to an unfaithful ex-wife who is both living with a well-off partner and denying her former husband access to his children will sometimes feel driven to dress up as Batman and stop the traffic on Tower Bridge.

It is the judges who have decided that divorce settlements must be equalised so a wife can get a bigger share of money she has not earned. It is the judges who have given legal status to the pre-nup, introducing to the law the assumption that marriage is not for life.

Shall I take it in stages? Continue reading “The Daily Mail and the Moral Crusade” »

The man who built his house on sand

Posted on | January 3, 2012 | 7 Comments

No man can stop the tide. Sir Paul Coleridge is to build a Marriage Foundation, to strengthen the institution of marriage and to counter the “scourge of society” family breakdown. “Brave Brave Brave Bra-ave Sir Canute!” *sung to the tune of Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python*.

We are indeed a society awash with family breakdown. Can we fix it by convincing our serially monogamous society that marriage for life is a great idea, better than cohabitation, and that we should stick to it come hell or high water? Can we ‘eck as like. It’s a romantic idea, but we don’t live in Midsomer, where the order of things is palpable, fixed, and where consequence follows transgression as surely as night follows day.

Should we aspire to a re-emergence of marriage as the norm? Or should we aspire to something more intangible – more stable, durable relationships and better ways of dealing with the aftermath of breakdown when it happens?

Is it helpful to be publicly and sweepingly critical of those who walk away from unhappy or unsuccessful relationships? To chide them like wayward children. I would suggest not.

“People want to change horses mid-stream – it’s the disease of the modern age. Soon you find the new partner is as flawed as the last. It is like a hydra: you cut off one head and get rid of a boring partner but inherit 26 new problems, your new partner’s children, family and so on.”

Is it constructive to insinuate that those who have experienced relationship breakdown have trivially given up on that relationship, without thought or regret? I would suggest not.

“Marriage, as the best structure in which to raise children, needs to be affirmed, strengthened and supported. Recycle your rubbish by all means, but be very slow to recycle your partner.”

When politicians and public figures start pontificating about marriage as if it is some kind of solution to the much broader issue of family breakdown, the atheist in me gets a bit twitchy. I suspect a religious agenda in the background. Especially when the thinktank, institute or foundation is intended to “research” a question for which the founder has already identified the answer. The “Marriage is the answer, please go prove” approach is not new, and does not auger well. But in truth it’s not the whiff of  religious paternalism that has brought me out in a rash, it’s the narrow world view.

Stop looking with dismay and distaste at “the modern world”! One man’s perseverance is another’s living hell. One man’s disease is another’s liberty. One man sees himself surrounded by writhing hydra, some of us see the wonderful diversity of evolution. Look at the world we are living in! The only people that think that marriage should be a template for how we all live our lives are the godbotherers. I know Coleridge says he doesn’t want to sound as if he is on a moral crusade. But that is exactly what it sounds like. I say this as a married woman, for whom in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer have been tested a few times over the last decade. Marriage was my choice, but it may not be everyone’s choice. Families come in all shapes and sizes. They work because you work at them, not because they’ve been sanctioned or formalised – although that process may help people to commit and to feel secure, that may not be so for others – for example the victims of abusive relationships, those who have been financially broken by an earlier divorce, those for whom remarriage would create difficulties in extended family relationships – or those who have lived through a childhood parented by a miserable mother and father who stayed together “for the kids”. And for many people no doubt, marriage simply does not have the same resonance that it has for those of us who have been raised in an environment where marriage still exists as a functioning norm. Those of us whose mum and dad are still together are the lucky ones but we can’t graft our “normal” on other people, with very different lives and different experiences.

I know where Coleridge is coming from. It is frustrating, heartbreaking, depressing to see these families pass before you every day. And there are couples who should have worked harder at their relationship before moving on. But do you remember that feeling at school where the teacher would put everyone in detention when nobody owned up? That burning disapproval from your authority figure for something entirely outside your control? It must never be forgotten that whilst each party to a relationship shares in the responsibility for maintaining a relationship and in its failure, neither is in control of their counterpart’s behaviour. To generalise in the laying of blame is to alienate the sensible. They don’t all look the same. Ex couples are more than ciphers for failure. They are comprised of broken individuals, some blameworthy, some not so much. Many of them who passionately believe in lifelong commitment, even if not in marriage as a means of cementing it. What should we do with the ones who have “failed”? Send them to the Civic Amenity Site? Coleridge wants them to embrace his ideas, but their school report card is with a red “Could do better”.

So, by all means lets have a Foundation to look at how we can help make relationships more durable, whatever kind of relationship they may be. Lets have a Foundation to look at how we can help people rebuild their lives when things go wrong. Lets take a look at families and what works and what doesn’t. But don’t try and sell us an answer from the past. Marriage as a social cement is a nostalgic dream, from a time when exit options were limited, and when people’s right and ability to define how they should live their own life was hobbled.

Don’t tell me marriage is the answer. We have that now and from what I can tell it hasn’t worked out that well. It doesn’t seem to stop people being cheats, liars, or bastards. It doesn’t cure selfishness or a failure to appreciate your partner’s needs. It doesn’t override an inability to form lasting adult relationships borne of psychological and emotional damage following a childhood of neglect, abuse or trauma. It doesn’t make people better parents – being a rubbish mum or dad is not the exclusive preserve of the great unwed. Married couples don’t talk more, share more, protect each other more than their unmarried counterparts. They aren’t better people, or better at relationships. They do however, mark the start of their relationship with a “big do” which will probably put them in unmanageable debt for years to come and which may well set a pattern of unsustainable spending…and they do subsequently do quite a lot of getting divorced, from which they take more disentangling legally and financially, which makes for more bad endings and more unhappy children. And I say this as someone who believes in marriage – remember I am married.

Couples comprised of healthy adults who are committed, mutually supportive and equipped to deal with the stresses and strains upon relationship will succeed whether married or not. Many such couples may choose to marry or become civil partners, and they may well become a statistical success story. But credit for that goes to the couple, to their parents, not to the institution of marriage. People make relationships work. People (and circumstance) make relationships fail. Labels don’t.

I feel I should return to my original metaphor, which I have left floating unanchored…The shape of our island is changing. The foundations of society are rock solid relationships. We must build on that, not cling on crumbling buildings that have been reclaimed by advancing tides that have changed the landscape for ever.

[Rant ends]

Onwards and upwards

Posted on | January 2, 2012 | No Comments

No, I’m not going to bore you with more whining about the state of my health (much better thanks – have got that post-illness warpdrive thing going on), nor am I going to do a run down of 2011 or my new year’s resolution for 2012. But I feel that on this, my last evening before diving back into work, I should post a little something.

I’m feeling pretty upbeat about 2012. Objectively this may be foolish, what with all the doom and gloom about legal aid, a 10% pay cut not 8 weeks away and yadiyadiyada. You know all that. I can get boring.

But I am still feeling upbeat. This may be connected to the glass of bubbly, it may be the effect of steely dan emanating from my husband’s ipad (this is a remote possibility only), it may be the contrast between my general pathetic limpness last week during my malaise and my bouncy revival, it may be the heady aroma of freshly slaughtered fir tree that is combining with the bubbles to make me go a bit funny. But I do feel positive.

I have that positive feeling that comes from seeing your mantlepieces emerge from underneath that layer of sparkly toot. How simple and uncluttered it looks (everything’s relative – it’s not tidy at all). All the furniture has been restored to its rightful place, giving the illusion of enough space to move around in (Until the kids get up in the morning). And my kitchen has that rare tidiness that comes from having had guests today – all the washing up is done and the kitchen has been given a proper once over that is only seen immediately prior to the descent of guests with allergies. By 8am it will be awash with breadcrumbs, decorated with a pattern of little wet cat footprints, discarded juice cups and assorted clean / dirty / wet / dry laundry in transit from A to B. But it looks serene now.

But here’s what I’m thinking as of tonight about how next year might go…

Continue reading “Onwards and upwards” »

Bah (soothing menthol eucalyptus) humbug

Posted on | December 30, 2011 | 9 Comments

It’s not often I start writing a blog post with no idea of where it might go, although by the same token it’s not infrequent that the destination of such a post is not where I had predicted. And it is positively common for me to meander along the way into areas I had not known were on my mind. But today I don’t even have a plan to divert from. I just feel I ought to write something or other during this semi-lucid moment. God knows no other blogger seems to have had the common sense to take a break over Christmas. Bloody lunatics.

No I have not been existing since the courts closed for Crimbo in a haze of alcohol that has left me incapaboble of typing. Although the chance would’ve been a fine thing. I’ve been unwell (Yes yes thanks for the sympathy etc). Something masquerading as flu before Xmas, that was very unpleasant but oddly gone as quickly as it came and left me feeling washed out and fraudulent, and then at about 8pm on Boxing Day – uh oh – achy shoulders. And I’ve been in bed from then until this morning. Excellent way to spend the only time off that one can ever take without causing any more of a cashflow aneurism than is already built in to a month with so many bank holidays.

Yes, this Christmas I need not your trinkets and baubles, your gorging and your merrymaking. For I have been sleeping and watching news 24 on endless loop (the only thing that kept the bizarre recurrent dreams at bay) and eating tomato soup and yoghurt. My tonsils are dangling pustulent baubles, my aching body like that of one who has had a bloody good night out. Only I haven’t. Continue reading “Bah (soothing menthol eucalyptus) humbug” »

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A blog in which I ricochet from too serious to too flippant, and alternate between a bit clever, a bit interesting and a bit ranty: Pink Tape neatly functions as both a blog about family law and a therapeutic escape valve for me. >>more

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