Law Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for legal professionals, students, and others with experience or interest in law. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have been watching a Supreme Court hearing, and there are certain things that I don't understand. I have also not been able to find what these things mean on the internet.
The Supreme Court hearing is: https://www.supremecourt.uk/watch/uksc-2020-0133/150621-am.html
What is meant by "the father and the bride test"? (approx 33min in)
This is an appeal from the decision in A Local Authority v JB [2020] EWCA Civ 735. In the part of the hearing to which you refer, Lord Stephens is asking the appellant’s counsel about the following principle, quoted at [31] of the judgment under appeal:
When considering capacity to marry, the question is whether X has capacity to marry, not whether she has capacity to marry Y rather than Z. The question of capacity to marry has never been considered by reference to a person's ability to understand or evaluate the characteristics of some particular spouse or intended spouse: Re E (and Alleged Patient); Sheffield City Council v E and S [2004] EWHC 2808 (Fam).
In Re E, Munby J said at [91]:
The point is suggested by Miss Waddicor's very pertinent rhetorical question: Can it seriously be suggested that the court has the right to vet E's suitors, to decide that X is suitable but that Y is unsuitable, to select who E is to marry? The answer to that question, in my judgment, is that the court quite clearly has no such role.
The ‘father of the bride test’ is the proposition rejected here: that the Court of Protection could play the traditional role of the father of the bride, by granting permission to marry a particular person, rather than determining the person’s capacity to marry in a more general sense.
