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Key decisions

  • Carter [2018] FamCAFC 45
  • Granger [2018] FCCA 51
  • Kirvan & Tomaras [2018] FamC

Procedure – Full Court grants adult son access to his parents’ 1977 court file pursuant to FLR 24.13

In Carter [2018] FamCAFC 45 (6 March 2018) the Full Court (Ainslie-Wallace, Murphy and Aldridge JJ) allowed the appeal of a 53 year old son against Johns J’s dismissal of his application for access to his parents’ 1977 court file.

After the applicant’s parents separated in 1976 he lived with his mother and three siblings until he was 15 when he began living with his father. When 17 he boarded with another family.

His wish was to search the court record in the hope of ‘mak[ing] some sense of’ why his family became ‘dysfunctional’ and to better understand why he was separated from his siblings (at [17]-[20]). Johns J limited the son’s access under FLR 24.13 to his parents’ consent parenting orders, refusing leave to search the rest of the file.

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