Rob Marsh

I am a Law PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. I previously completed an undergraduate law degree at the University of Oxford, and an LLM at UCL where I was a Dean’s Scholar.

Prior to starting my PhD, I qualified and practised as a family law barrister at Coram Chambers, London, where I remain a door tenant. I also volunteered with the UCL Legal Advice Clinic as a family law adviser. Before qualifying as a barrister, I was a research assistant at the Law Commission of England and Wales on their ‘Building Families Through Surrogacy’ project.

I am particularly interested in family law and its interconnections with human rights, children’s rights and legal theory.

My PhD research explores how English judges do – and how they should – decide cases where it is proposed that children should be separated from their parents to prevent them coming to harm. When deciding whether or not to separate a child from their parents, judges are required, by law, to treat the child’s welfare as their main concern. But since the millennium, judges have also been required to take into account children’s and parents’ human rights. I am interested in how judges have juggled child welfare and human rights in these cases, 1991-present, and in how the changed emphasis, away from just considering child welfare, has impacted children. Ultimately, my research aims to promote more transparent and more compelling judicial reasoning in these cases, which would benefit the thousands of children and parents affected every year, and help enhance public confidence in the justice system.