David Burrows reviews Sir James Munby’s tenure as president & his impact on family law
I yield to no-one in my admiration for Sir James Munby P as a lawyer. The litany of his case law developments is brilliant. However, while the President, who is due to step down later in the year, is responsible for procedural reform, he is not—or should not be—a law reformer. Judicial duties sit uneasily with law reform. Judges reform the law incrementally (as Lord Bingham explains in Rule of law (2010)) by deciding cases which come before them.
Sir James’s assertion that family lawyers have seen the ‘largest reform of the family justice system’ on his watch does not, I am afraid, hold up (see ‘Family law: plus ca change?’). Those of us who witnessed the introduction of Children Act 1989 and its accompanying family proceedings rules; the ‘pilot scheme’ for ancillary relief; and the drip-drip feed of Civil Procedure Rules 1998 principles (especially of case management) into family law saw a series of, individually, much wider reforms to family law
