One of the major contributions that John Eekelaar has made to family law has been his groundbreaking work on legal professionals and their roles within the family justice system. This work has often been the result of enduring intellectual partnership with Mavis Maclean, the two of them linking empirical work seamlessly with deep theory, doctrinal analysis and policy perspectives, increasingly, later, in standing up to the challenges facing an embattled family justice system. But it also links to other aspects of Eekelaar’s scholarship, including in particular his powerful writing about legal aid and access to justice in the family law field, demonstrating Eekelaar’s ability to give abstract, theoretical concepts a concrete reality.

Having had my doctorate supervised by Maclean and examined by Eekelaar (along with Gillian Douglas), it is perhaps unsurprising that this work on the legal professions, on what family justice professionals actually do, and what this tells us about the law as it really exists, also permeates much of my own scholarship. In this chapter, while considering some of the strands of Eekelaar’s work in this area, I draw on a series of qualitative interviews with family justice professionals, conducted by Mavis Maclean and myself in the summer of 2020, to think about how some of the ideas raised in the studies that I cite can inform understandings of the family justice system during and after the pandemic.

1. THE FAMILY JUSTICE SYSTEM

While the idea of there being a family justice system is not entirely new, it is also not of such longevity as to be unremarkable. In their Judges book in 2013, Eekelaar and Maclean spend some time explaining the idea of the family justice system, which they say includes:

As Eekelaar and Maclean say:

The work of the courts, and of legal professionals, is particularly emphasised, along with the mutually’supplemental’ relationship between legal remedies and mediation.