Regulating Emotion: Judging Contact Disputes

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which judges reach their conclusions in disputed contact cases; how they construct the problem requiring resolution and how they seek to resolve it. It begins by reviewing the ways that judges, through a variety of discursive strategies such as their deployment of welfare discourse and through their use of harm warrants, sustain the now well known assumptions that contact is beneficial and lack of it is damaging, so making orders in favour of contact and their enforcement seem inevitable and unchallengeable. In similar ways, judges also designate conflict as harmful, so rendering parents who fight over contact ‘bad’ . The article then goes on to show how these starting points form the basis of judges’ constructions of dispute and so of the parties before them.