Blog
Anonymisation Guidance – a curtain of secrecy?
The President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew MacFarlane issued some guidance last week on the anonymisation of published judgments in family court cases. You can read that guidance here. The Daily Mail reported this as follows : Curtain of secrecy should be...
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Born of Injustice – how it came to be written
This is a guest post by Keith Cooper, who is a senior staff writer for The Doctor magazine. Keith kindly agreed to write a post at our request when we saw his extraordinary writing about a family court case, and realised that a huge amount of work must have gone into...
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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 Times -The launch of Sammy Woodhouse's...
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Media regulation update
We examine developments in media regulation and litigation costs since the government decided, earlier this year, to abandon long-promised plans to resume the Leveson Inquiry into press misconduct.
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Making sense of parental alienation (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this blog post, we provided an update on policy and practice regarding issues of parental alienation. Re D [2018] EWFC B64 is a very lengthy (64 pages) fact-finding judgment by HHJ Clifford Bellamy in Chesterfield Family Court, delivered on 19 October. As...
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Legal Blogging in Leeds
This morning, finding myself in Leeds and with a morning to spare I attended Leeds Family Court to try a spot of legal blogging in a court that I was unfamiliar with. I arrived by 9.15am (slightly later than planned thanks to the genius of google maps) and on...
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Open court for appeals to family judges
A number of appeals from lesser judges in the family courts were transferred from being heard in the Court of Appeal to be heard by a judge – mostly High Court judges – in the Family Court (from 14 April 2014). Since then there has been sporadic debate as to whether...
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The Sammy Woodhouse Story and Associated Campaigns – An Update
When we first posted on Tuesday about the Sammy Woodhouse story as it appeared in The Times (initially an anonymous story but swiftly identified as a story about Sammy and her son) the only real source of information was The Times itself (and a brief video posted on...
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Making sense of parental alienation (Part 1)
It is now a year since The Guardian published startling claims that Cafcass (in England) were introducing new polices and practice guidance that would ‘crack down’ on parents who were guilty of manipulating their children through ‘parental alienation’. It soon...
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When should I apply for permission not to notify a father about a court case concerning his child?
Since the Sammy Woodhouse story first hit the news on Tuesday, the shape of the campaign she has launched for a change in the law relating to the rights of rapist fathers has gone through a number of changes. However, one early call was for guidance on the...
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