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

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 [...]

What Kind of Debate Should We Be Having About Domestic Violence?

This post is a guest blog post written by Sarah Phillimore. Sarah is a family barrister with over 15 years of experience. She tweets as @SVPhillimore and this is her first foray into blogging. This post arose from a tweet from @change4victims calling for support for an e-petition entitled “review of access laws for domestic abusers”, subsequently retweeted by @womensaid. The petition [...]

Guest blog Post: Hunger 4 Justice

The post that follows is a guest blog post by Nick Langford. Nick is a regular commenter on this blog. He and I have disagreed about many things in the comments threads, but always (I think) in respectful if robust language. I am happy to extend the opportunity to Nick to write a one off [...]

Parental Alienation – a sad story

I don’t have time today to analyse this case in a full blog post but I did want to post a link to it. John Bolch at Family Lore has been able to provide a very helpful summary of it and links to the judgment.

Musings on new fangled equality

Just a thought. I’m not trying to be controversial or nuffing. But it did occur to me today that whilst the clamour for a presumption of equal parenting is all well and good (I agree its a solution that should be given serious consideration in most cases, but not that this should be elevated to [...]

Shock News – Family Justice System Stretched to Breaking Point

Thanks to Family Law Week for alerting me to this judgment of Thorpe LJ in which the court considered the proper husbanding of limited resources in determining the way forward in a contact case. It was in the course of that judgment last year that Thorpe LJ remarked that the family justice system was ‘stretched [...]

Lib Dem Contact Proposals

A colleague emails: …When looking through the LibDem manifesto this week, I noticed an express commitment, buried deep in the document at page 52, which may be of some interest (and reads, as follows)…. “The Liberal Democrats will “introduce a default contact arragangement, which would divide the child’s time between their two parents in the [...]

Surviving a Stepfamily Christmas

I must be moving up in the world: I haven’t dealt with a single last minute spat over who gets the kids on Christmas Day this year. I had steeled myself for the annual onset of the Christmas Contact frenzy: desperate attempts to shoehorn in urgent hearings, and to persuade a judge to give the [...]

Wishes & Feelings Reports – No Panacea

I attended the FLBA Annual Conference in Bath today and was struck by a really interesting talk by Dr Kirk Weir, Consultant Child, Adolescent & Family Psychiatrist. He presented statistics based on his work as an expert reporting in High Conflict Contact Cases over a number of years, in support of the proposition that an emphasis [...]

Keeping Watch on the Purse Strings

Dealing recently with a case where a publicly mother ordered to make a child available for contact but who had concerns about its continuation was refused public funding to make an application to vary until such time as the father had applied to enforce. How can that be a) in the interests of the child, causing delay [...]