Find tips for searching Family Court judgments, as well as a link to a list of all Family Court judgments available on this website, and keywords you can use to help with your search.

On this page:

• Browsing Family Court judgments
• Family Court keywords
• How to find a Family Court judgment

Browsing Family Court judgments

The following link will open a list of all of the Family Court related judgments available on this database. The list has the most recently published judgments at the top.

All Family Court judgments

Judgments on family matters that are heard in the District Court are each given a Medium Neutral Citation (MNC) — this includes the year that the matter was heard, a court identifier, a unique number, and the names of the parties to the case.

Family Court decisions appear in the following format on this website:
Gremmle v Gray [2016] NZFC 1234.

Family Court keywords

The Family Court keyword list contains keywords (words, phrases, and legislation) commonly referred to in Family Court judgements on this site:

Family Court search keyword list

How to find a Family Court judgment

To find a Family Court judgment:

1. From the keyword list (see above) select a word, phrase, or legislation title and/or section number relating to the matter you want to search on.
2. Enter the keyword or phrase into the Search box.
3. Select Family from the Filter search drop-down list.
4. Select Search or press Enter.

To limit the number of search results returned, you can also filter by the year and full date that the judgment was published on this site.

Searching by name not recommended

Searching by party name is not recommended for Family Court judgments, as content or names within judgments may be suppressed. This may be due to a statutory provision, a suppression order of the court, or an order made in the course of delivering judgment.

Statutory suppression or court order may apply

Some published judgments may contain banners noting that a statutory suppression order applies, or a court order may be noted in the judgment. These decisions are only published after the names have been changed and any identifying details of the protected person have been redacted.

For more information on statutory prohibitions see:

Statutory prohibitions on publication for media [PDF, 211 KB], August 2020

Judgment may be anonymised

Judgments in this database may have been anonymised by:

• replacing real names with pseudonyms
• where it is appropriate, editing and removing information that would allow the protected parties to be identified.

In Youth Court and some types of Family Court judgments, real names are also replaced with initials.

Identifying information, or information within a judgment that has been removed to comply with legal requirements, is indicated by [ ]. For example, [address deleted].