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This open access book offers a ground-breaking reinterpretation of the modern evolution of English financial remedies law, exposing systematic under-valuation of women's unpaid caring work.

It argues that the House of Lords in White and Miller; McFarlane sought to eradicate gender discrimination by promoting equality of outcome, sharing the economic consequences of interdependence more fairly. Through detailed analysis of key judgments, the book shows how judicial citation practices have diverted the law's trajectory and entrenched gender bias.

The book demonstrates how a small, homogeneous group of senior judges resisted the progressive shift and maintained a legal paradigm that privileges financial contributions and the clean break over interdependence and care. Using an innovative methodology combining doctrinal analysis with critical discourse analysis, the book reveals how these judges distorted White and Miller; McFarlane, maintaining an appearance of fidelity to the judgments while minimising their impact. This case law analysis is set within a feminist political economy framework to show how judicial resistance to valuing unpaid care in family law mirrors global patterns of institutional blindness to the value of socially reproductive labour.

The result is both a searing critique of the law's development and a powerful exposition of how judicial homogeneity can combine with dubious use of precedent to sustain systemic inequality. The book calls for a more diverse and self-reflective judiciary, and for a renewed commitment to fairness that places care at the heart of financial remedies law to address women's persistently worse post-divorce financial outcomes.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.