Do we need physical family courts?

ABSTRACT

The family court responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by rapidly transitioning to remote hearings. Almost four years later, remote hearings remain common, although the clear direction of travel, especially for children and domestic abuse injunction cases, has been back towards everyone attending hearings face-to-face. In this article, we explore what might be lost when family court hearings take place remotely, and, more fundamentally, whether we really need physical family courts. We suggest that the family court is ‘multifunctional’: as well as having an important role in adjudication, it is a physical space in which family members can try to resolve their family law dispute through reflection, negotiation and conciliation, often with the moral support of a legal team, and backed by the judge’s authority. We consider guidance issued during the pandemic and show that the non-adjudicative functions of the family court were initially overlooked by the senior judiciary. Finally, we explore legal professionals’ experiences of remote family justice to assess how well the family court can perform its various functions remotely. We conclude that physical family courts are an essential part of the family justice system and, for those family disputes that require court involvement, they provide significant benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Family court
• COVID-19 pandemic
• remote hearings
• functions of the family court

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Mavis Maclean for co-conducting the empirical study which this article draws on and for her contributions to our thinking about these issues, and to Anne Barlow for directing us to the work on legal geographies. Thanks to the study participants for sharing their experiences. An earlier version of this article was published as George (2023). Views and errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

Both authors are barristers practising in England and Wales.

Notes

1. We have excluded the weeks of 31.5.2020, 27.12.2020, 3.1.2021, 10.1.2021 and 4.4.2021 from Figure 1; these are statistical anomalies caused by holiday court closures and low data reporting rates.