Nicholas Wall cheerfully quips in his introduction to this collection of papers of the 1995 Dartington Hall Conference: ‘I have often heard it said that conference papers are the kiss of death to publishers.’ I am happy to report that this expectation is unfounded and that this publication is well worth the reading. To bring together some twenty-eight judges and a roughly equal number of psychoanalytically trained child professionals and invite them to exchange papers to encourage discussion was a welcome idea.

I approached the book with a sense of intrigue as to how that inaccessible world of the courtroom and the law would view child psychotherapists. What sense do judges make of us as ‘expert witnesses’ trying to convey our sense of a child's faltering account of their abuse or their hopes and fears about living at home? What would judges want us to address in our court reports. Can they appreciate a therapist's qualms on a client's right to confidentiality. Trained in child psychotherapy, not the law, we have