Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
20 March 2025, 6:00 pm–7:00 pm
This Inaugural Lecture was on ‘Family Law As Social Policy: Taking Family Problems Upstream' and delivered by Professor Rob George (Laws UCL).
Speaker: Rob George (Faculty of Laws, UCL)
Chair: Mavis Maclean (University of Oxford)
About this Inaugural Lecture
In recent years, family law legislation has often been a focal point for reforms which have aimed as much at changing the societal attitudes and behaviours of family members as affecting their statutory entitlements or how the courts approach family law cases. There has been a tension in the approach of politicians between, on the one hand, restricting access to the courts and thus to law for family disputes and, on the other, using family law as a tool of policy to influence how family members think and behave in relation to one another. This lecture situates family law as a tool of social policy, but one which is often not up to or not suited to the job. Post-separation parenting arrangements are a key example: using family law, as it now does, to stipulate that the involvement of both parents in a child’s life is likely to promote their welfare comes too late to make effective change. The problem needs to be taken ‘upstream’, considering the policy factors that influence the way in which parenting was arranged prior to parental separation rather than focusing only on arrangements made post-separation. Policy factors that affect family problems such as this include parental leave and flexible working policies, situated as part of employment law; housing policy, seen as part of social welfare law; and provision of services such as mental health support, part of healthcare law (if seen as a concern of law at all). This lecture seeks to reposition these upstream policy issues as the central considerations for those interested in effecting societal change to family life.
20 March 2025, 6:00 pm–7:00 pm
This Inaugural Lecture was on ‘Family Law As Social Policy: Taking Family Problems Upstream' and delivered by Professor Rob George (Laws UCL).
Speaker: Rob George (Faculty of Laws, UCL)
Chair: Mavis Maclean (University of Oxford)
About this Inaugural Lecture
In recent years, family law legislation has often been a focal point for reforms which have aimed as much at changing the societal attitudes and behaviours of family members as affecting their statutory entitlements or how the courts approach family law cases. There has been a tension in the approach of politicians between, on the one hand, restricting access to the courts and thus to law for family disputes and, on the other, using family law as a tool of policy to influence how family members think and behave in relation to one another. This lecture situates family law as a tool of social policy, but one which is often not up to or not suited to the job. Post-separation parenting arrangements are a key example: using family law, as it now does, to stipulate that the involvement of both parents in a child’s life is likely to promote their welfare comes too late to make effective change. The problem needs to be taken ‘upstream’, considering the policy factors that influence the way in which parenting was arranged prior to parental separation rather than focusing only on arrangements made post-separation. Policy factors that affect family problems such as this include parental leave and flexible working policies, situated as part of employment law; housing policy, seen as part of social welfare law; and provision of services such as mental health support, part of healthcare law (if seen as a concern of law at all). This lecture seeks to reposition these upstream policy issues as the central considerations for those interested in effecting societal change to family life.
