1. AN APPRECIATION OF AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIOLEGAL WORKING RELATIONSHIP

Having had the pleasure of working with John Eekelaar for almost half a century, I would like to express my profound respect for his knowledge and understanding of family law, and my appreciation of his interest in social policy ideas as part of a sociolegal approach to family law research in Oxford. When the Covid pandemic began, we had begun to talk about a study of the relationship between welfare and justice in the management of family matters. This chapter will briefly describe how we reached this point in our long interdisciplinary conversation, and where it might lead.

When the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies opened in 1974, the involvement of Professor Oliver MacGregor ensured an interest in family matters, and empirical work was immediately on the agenda, into the matrimonial jurisdiction of registrars, led by John Eekelaar. When I joined as a social policy researcher, formerly at Bedford College, my role was to work on the large personal injury survey, with a view to raising the issue of no-fault compensation along the lines of recent law reform in New Zealand, the home of our Director, Don Harris. This focused on the relationship between the legal obligation to compensate, and the social obligation to meet individual need. When the compensation study finished, Don Harris, in his wisdom, tentatively introduced me to John Eekelaar, who was already associated with the Centre, and was also interested in the relationship between legal process and social outcome, in this case the financial arrangements after divorce. John had already published his groundbreaking book on Family Law and Social Policy. During the Thatcher years, when social policy, or the study of social needs and how to meet them, was having a hard time, I was shown at the Centre how a legal right could be a far stronger bargaining tool for change than individual need. So when John Eekelaar encouraged me to join him in looking at the difficult financial position of women and children after divorce, I was delighted. The work of the Law Commission, followed by the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act 1984, had explicitly considered needs, as well as rights, in the approach to financial settlement. But this had led to highly charged debate.