local government – Robert Sharp

I’ve done another judgment summary for Family Law Week. I’m finding its a useful way to gain an understanding of an area of law,.

This time I’ve dealt with the snappily titled Re E (A Child – Application to Discharge Care Order – Failures of Local Authority) [2025] EWFC 223 (B).

This was a judgment of HHJ Earley regarding an application by a child to discharge a Care Order that the Court had made ten months earlier. The Court dismissed the application and maintained the order, but in doing so made pointed comments regarding the local authority’s failures to implement the agreed care plan. The judge reviewed the legal authorities regarding the Court’s oversight of care placements, once a final order has been made. It is salutary reading for those working in social care and those representing Looked After Children.

The questions that preoccupy Philosophy students often cause them to be teased by their peers. In my case, ontology was the big hilarity, as we studied the history of philosophers asking, “how do we know that this chair actually exists?“. My science-studying friends ribbed me for examining something that was (in their eyes) completely futile. I do not have the wit to explain to them that the same thought processes should lead us to examine whether other things could also be trusted to exist—scientific data, for example.
Discussion around house prices has flared again. Right Move have published data showing that house prices in London and its orbit have risen 2% in the past quarter, and 10% in the past month alone. (These figures seem so extraordinary I wonder if we need a freshman philosophy student to ask whether they actually exist! Meanwhile, Right Move calls them ‘unsustainable‘)
We know that house prices do not really exist in the same way that our chairs exist. They are constructs of human interaction, a rough guess at the point of intersection on a supply-and-demand graph that no-one actually gets to see. Continue reading “The ontology of London house prices”