After sustained lobbying from all sides, the government finally announced in April that divorce laws in England and Wales will be reformed and updated. The impetus for reform has gathered significant momentum over recent years. Prominent members of the judiciary, the Family Mediation Taskforce and Resolution, the national organisation of family lawyers, have all argued […]

The case of Owens v Owens is unusual. Not because Mrs Tini Owens is a woman of 68 who wants to divorce her 80 year-old husband, Hugh: after all, in 2016, there were 114,000 divorce petitions in England & Wales. What marks out the Owens case is that Mr Owens contested the divorce – one […]

The issue of single parent families has attracted the attention of headline writers for more than a generation. But in the reporting of data relating to them, much of it centres on the two million single parents who comprise a quarter of all UK families with dependent children. Notably, rather less coverage is given to […]

The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as Charles Dickens called it, is well-known to every student of Law, and of English Literature, as an epic legal battle. An entirely imaginary dispute derived from his fertile imagination, it forms the centrepiece of Bleak House epitomising the very slow movement of the law that was a very […]

In a landmark judgment, a wife has been denied a divorce by the Court of Appeal. After a 39-year marriage, Tini Owens applied for a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s unreasonable behaviour. In a highly unusual move, a High Court judge in the Oxford Family court, refused her application for a decree nisi, after […]

A couple from London, Ms Rebecca Steinfield and Mr Charles Keidan, recently lost their battle in the Court of Appeal, to enter into a civil partnership despite being a heterosexual couple. Civil Partnerships were introduced in 2004 to enable same sex couples to formalise their relationship and acquire legal rights a kin to marriage. The government […]