Are you involved in making decisions in court, a tribunal, or another formal decision-making environment? This book gives guidance in the skills required to reach and deliver well-structured judicial decisions. The authors (all of whom have extensive judicial and quasi-judicial experience across England and Wales) guide the readers on the skills required at each stage of a hearing, including: ensuring there is a fair hearing; standards and conduct for decision-makers; successful communication; taking into account the needs of vulnerable participants and litigants in person; case management; assessing evidence; and reaching and delivering a well-structured decision. The book includes practical guidance, examples, and short exercises to help the reader engage with the issues discussed and understand the skills required. Having this book to hand will enable you to make effective and fair decisions that inspire confidence.

This book presents a wholly new perspective on the Child Support Agency. The authors were granted privileged access to the CSA's own staff and were thus able to monitor case conduct from both the Agency and the client perspective. In a gripping analysis they compare the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers,and, critically, they incorporate the experience and views of the beleaguered CSA staff who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in those same cases. The media picture of the misery visited upon 'absent fathers' is borne out in part, but even more striking is the authors' account of a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure. Their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement - with which courts had grappled for decades - could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.

Written by one of the UK's leading scholars of welfare law, this book analyses the current child support legislation in its broader historical and social context, synthesising both doctrinal and socio-legal approaches to legal research and scholarship. The book draws on the historical and legal literature on the Poor Law and the development of both the public and private law obligation of child maintenance. Modern child support law must also be considered in the context of both social and demographic changes and in the light of popular norms about child maintenance liabilities. The main part of the book is devoted to an analysis of the modern child support scheme, and the key issues are addressed: the distinction between applications in 'private' and 'benefit' cases and the extent to which the courts retain a role in child maintenance matters; the basis for, and the justification for, the exception from the obligation for parents with care on benefit to co-operate with the Child Support Agency where they fear 'undue harm or distress'; the assessment of income for the purposes of the formula and the evidential difficulties this entails; the tension between the formula, which ignores the parent with care's income, and the demands of distributive justice; the further conflict between the formula, under which liability is capped only for the very wealthy, and the traditional approach of private law, which is premised on children being entitled to maintenance rather than a share in family wealth; the treatment of special cases under the formula by way of 'variations' (formerly 'departures'); the nature of decision-making and the scope for appeals; and the efficacy of the provisions relating to collection and enforcement. This book has been shortlisted for the 2007 SLSA Book Prize.

This book presents a wholly new perspective on the Child Support Agency. The authors were granted privileged access to the CSA's own staff and were thus able to monitor case conduct from both the Agency and the client perspective. In a gripping analysis they compare the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers,and, critically, they incorporate the experience and views of the beleaguered CSA staff who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in those same cases. The media picture of the misery visited upon 'absent fathers' is borne out in part, but even more striking is the authors' account of a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure. Their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement - with which courts had grappled for decades - could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.

The 2012 Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme (CICS) deals with some 33,000 applications for compensation each year. It has, since 1964, been one of the principal means by which the state aims to meet victims' expectations following an offence of violence, but it also displays a clear doctrinal effort to differentiate 'deserving' from 'undeserving' victims. Over much of the same period criminal courts and agencies have enjoyed powers to order offenders to pay compensation to their victims, most recently as an element of restorative justice. Split into two parts, Criminal Injuries Compensation is an authoritative analysis of the statutory provisions governing these various remedies. Part One, State Compensation, analyses the Scheme's defining provisions: what constitutes 'a criminal injury', what persons and injuries may be compensated, the rules governing the victim's own conduct and character, the assessment of the award, and the procedures governing applications, appeals and judicial review. Part Two, Offender Compensation, analyses the conditions under which a criminal court may make a compensation order as an element of its sentencing decision, concluding with the potential of restorative justice to deliver offender compensation to victims. The book also touches on the wider political and criminal justice context of compensation. Written and edited by an expert academic and practitioner team, Criminal Injuries Compensation is an essential text for all those with an interest in understanding the statutory, judicial and administrative rules that govern state and offender payment of compensation to victims of violent crime.