Tolstoy was wrong. The opening line of Anna Karenina declares: “Happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Carol Coulter’s first volume of 103 anonymised case reports from the Family Law Reporting Project suggests the opposite: the families who end up in court are unhappy in strikingly similar ways.

The case reports from these private family law proceedings are separate to the continuing childcare law reports from the Child Law Project she started in 2012. The latest report was commissioned from the Child Law Project – a respected independent entity – by Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan while the childcare reports are commissioned by the Department of Children.

The small but representative sample of cases is a first step towards greater transparency in a system that is frequently opaque due to stringent reporting restrictions. Even before the expert thematic analysis that will be published later, certain trends are clear.

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One judge comments that “communication is gold”, but if people are resorting to the family courts, aside from uncontested divorces, communication is usually already poor or has degenerated into........

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