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Discussing the role of parental consent in withdrawal of treatment cases

Over at Family Law Week, I have written two case summaries and a short legal analysis on the vexed issue of withdrawing care from seriously ill children.

  • In An NHS Foundation Trust -v- J [2025] EWHC 2247 (Fam), a child was born with catastophic brain damage after his mother suffered a cardiac arrest. The medical evidence was clear that it was not in the child’s best interests for him to stay on ventilation, but his mother did not have capacity to consent to withdrawal.
  • In The Trust -v- Z, FA and KB [2025] EWHC 2100 (Fam), a child was born with a congential brain abnormality and was being sustained only by invasive medical intervention. Several doctors were of the opinion that further treatment should be stopped, but his parents wanted to “give him the best chance” of continued life. The Court overruled the parents’ wishes and treatment was withdrawn.

In my short analysis I note that the law does not consider parental views to be determinative in these kinds of applications. They are relevant only to the extent that they illuminate the ‘best interests’ of the child. This is a point of law wiorht restating, because the lay-public’s view is often that parents should “have the final say” in such matters. I recall that this was the opinion expressed (often in shrill terms) during the Charlie Gard case in 2017 and the Archie Battersbee case in 2022.

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Re-Learning the Importance of Free Speech

The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by ABC, in response to comments made by the Chair of the FDC, is an example of government coercion. The pressure put on ABC by Brendan Carr, and Donald Trump’s celebration of Kimmel’s departure were classic authoritarian manoeuvres and, given the central importance of the First Amendment in US Culture, deeply un-American.

My former colleague Suzanne Nossell, erstwhile CEO at PEN America, wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed lamenting the “dark turn of American democracy.”

Some of us warned that this would happen. In response, I posted the following:

I must say this feels like a hideous “I told you so” moment. Progressive free speech campaigners spent the last few years listening to our allies in social justice movement trot out mantras like “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences” or “it’s not my job to educate you” and sharing that annoying xkcd comic about ‘showing you the door’ somehow not being a kind of censorship.

Continue reading “Re-Learning the Importance of Free Speech”
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Reasons to be Cheerful

Donald Trump, President-Elect

Donald Trump has won the presidential election.

This is terrible news. He is a convicted criminal and has no respect for the norms of democracy that keep societies together. He is unlikely help the poorest in society and the USA will remain divided for at least the next four years, probably much longer. The global climate is in greater peril. Ukraine’s predicament is worse. The outlook is bleak for the Gazans and the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

In the run-up to the election, the liberal press are full of warnings that this was somehow America’s last chance. The Atlantic posted articles on ‘The Fragility of American Freedom’ and the New Yorker Cover depicted Lady Liberty on a tightrope. The message is that now the USA has fallen to Trump, it will never recover.

The next few months and years will be galling and frustrating. But over the medium to long term, I remain optimistic. I think it’s helpful (if only to myself, as a coping mechanism) to list my heuristics and axioms.

Continue reading “Reasons to be Cheerful”
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Time to Ditch ‘Word Count’ in Favour of Bytes

There’s an amusing detail in the judgment of Mr Justice Peel in WC v HC (Financial Remedies Agreements) [2022] EWFC 22:

The parties’ s25 statements were limited to 20 pages of narrative.  Para 5.2 of PD27A mandates that narrative statements, among other documents, shall be typed in “a font no smaller than 12 point and with 1½ or double spacing”. H complied. W’s statement purported to comply in that it consisted of 20 pages, but because it used smaller font and spacing it was, in fact, about 27 pages compressed within the 20 page limit provided for by me.

— Paragraph 1(i)

This is a classic tactic that has been used by students the world over since the dawn of the word processing age. When I did it as a school boy, the aim was to increase the margins and font spacing so that one had to write less. Here, the tactic was deployed in order to write more.

Since we routinely use computers for everything, its time we abandoned the analogue concept of ‘pages’ as the standard for submissions. Why not simply specify a word count?

Or better still, bytes. There are 1,498 bytes of text in this blog post, for example. A 20 page document typeset at 12 point, 1.5 lines amounts to 45 to 50 Kb of text. Imposing a rule based on data would kill off any typesetting trickery, but also incentivise plain language — because drafters would not be penalised for using three shorter words in preference to one longer word.

(Hat-tip to Gordon Exall and the superb Civil Litigation Brief blog)

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Online Safety Bill: Sweeping Ministerial Harms

A third post in a trilogy of analyses of the draft Online Safety Bill.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee scrutinising the government’s Draft Online Safety Bill concluded its evidence sessions on 4 November. The group of MPs and Peers are now writing their report, which will include recommendations for amending the Bill to address the issues identified by those who gave evidence.

One area of particular concern to human rights groups, including ORG, is the powers given in the Bill that would allow the Secretary of State to direct and influence the work of the regulator, and therefore interfere with how the social media companies operate their services.

Read the rest of this post on the Open Rights Group blog.