a blog from the family bar
I was 52 last week, so I suppose that since I ve had twice as many times around the sun as there are supposed to be weeks in two generations worth of care proceedings, it s unsurprising if I feel like everything is changing and yet everything stays the same. But really, I do despair. Cleveland Orkney [ ]
In An observation of a domestic abuse fact finding hearing a worrying vignette (over on the Transparency Project website) I wrote about what unfolded during a family court hearing I observed as a legal blogger . I think that anyone who is not familiar with the family court will have been shocked by some of [ ]
The title of this post relates not to the shockingly long interregnum since my last, but to the news in today (via Jaime Craig, psychologist and member of the Family Justice Council) that the long heralded adjustments to the FPR relating to the instruction of appropriate psychological experts, have been approved and are about to [ ]
Prince Charles (as he then was) once popularised the phrase grey goo (Explained and Americanised by Wikipedia as gray goo ). He wasn t actually talking about AI but about nanobots. AI was merely a twinkle in a tech-bro s eye at that point, but it sometimes it feels apt to describe the waves of samey AI junk [ ]
Every time I have to explain to a youthful colleague what something now defunct was and how it used to work, I feel a little bit older This week I thought someone was mistakenly evangelical about the new marketing idea that is corners. (corners being the little cleverly die cut pieces of card, showing a [ ]
Since judgments arising from the Family Court are not routinely published, what we see in them isn t necessarily representative of patterns within the Family Court as a whole. But they are one useful source of at least some information about how the QLR system is operating on the ground, and give us a sense of [ ]
It really was a loooong month, wasn t it? Death, storms, and the general dank gloom that comes with this time of year. We escaped actual flooding or storm damage here, but it s not far from us. Quite apart from the weather though, the flow of urgent tasks has been pretty relentless, there is always a [ ]
in August 2007 right at the start of Pink Tape, I wrote a post called What s the difference between a barrister and a solicitor? Although that post is almost 20 years old it remains one of the all time most visited pages on this blog. Surprisingly, it remains more or less accurate (though it has [ ]
The news broke this week that Sir James Munby, towering figure in family justice, died suddenly on New Year s Day. I have been thinking since about what to say here about him. He was often the subject of posts on Pink Tape, right the way back to its inception before 2010, and I have spent [ ]
I m away at the moment, trying to decompress after another year that can be best described as a mixed bag. Some joy, some loss, much hard work. But as the clock strikes midnight at the end of 2025 I will shed one hat and put on another. I will stop being the Chair of the [ ]