It must be rare for one person to have played a key role in more than one capacity over an extended period in which a major area of law (family law in this case) underwent, and is still undergoing, changes that amount to a large scale reorientation of its aims and character. Yet, in her public writings and speeches, participation in bodies responsible for the conception and incubation of new legislation and, ultimately, nurturing the growth of those laws in the court system, Lady Hale has done just that. I will try to explain the nature of this reorientation, and a no doubt incomplete indication of her part in it, but, in doing so, I am not attempting to cover the central part she played in the Law Commission’s overall project of replacing the fragmented and, frankly, antiquated state of the English law relating to children with a coherent, modernised structure which was achieved by the Children Act 1989 (see Chapter 10, this volume). Since this period also substantially fell within my own academic life, I hope I will be forgiven if I indicate links to my contemporaneous commentary on it.