Katy Rensten Obituary

My pal Katy Rensten, who has died of melanoma aged fifty seven, changed into a solicitor grew to become barrister who specialised in family law and the household justice system.

Her dedication to her purchasers and their situations turned into well well-known amongst her colleagues, as was her calm decision to find the highest quality outcomes for all events – whatever thing that ensured she became regularly valued as a whole lot by her opponents as by using these she represented. In a similar fashion remarkable have been her generosity and kindness to junior contributors of the family bar, in addition to her aid for legislations college students from diverse backgrounds.

She became a member of the legislation Society’s children and family unit legislation panel as well as its infants’s legislation subcommittee, plus the household legislations Bar affiliation’s equality and diversity committees and the family unit Justice Council committees on domestic violence and diversity. In 2017 she become judged to be the family unit law junior barrister of the yr by means of family unit law journal.

Katy changed into born and raised in Cuffley, Hertfordshire, the core baby of Ivor Rensten, a instructor, whose Jewish household got here from japanese Europe to the East end of London on the turn of the twentieth century, and Mary (nee Morton), a trainer and author who, as the daughter of a Methodist minister, grew up in Jamaica. The household changed into each politically conscious and playful.

After Goffs faculty, Cheshunt, in 1984 she won an English diploma (and a half-blue in judo, wherein she changed into a black belt) from St Catharine’s school, Cambridge. She spent a 12 months on the Greenham common peace camp protesting in opposition t the siting of US nuclear weapons on British soil, and then took numerous jobs earlier than converting to legislation at Guildhall tuition (1991-ninety five).

Katy begun to practise as a solicitor in family legislations, adopted by work as a freelance suggest and consultant in toddlers’s legislations, before becoming a member of the bar and Coram Chambers in London in 2010.

There she specialised both in public and personal little ones’s legislations circumstances, with a specific hobby in representing events concerned in adoption and in acting in situations involving “choice families”. She seen household legislation as “a fancy, ceaselessly fascinating and intellectually annoying self-discipline”.

Katy cherished lifestyles, travelled greatly, rode a motorbike for decades, and cherished nothing stronger than constructing a bonfire and seeing the new year in with fireworks. She became unassuming, genial, completely happy, certainly not happier than when nattering and having amusing.

in the mid-Nineteen Nineties she installation domestic in north London with Marcia Willis-Stewart, a lawyer, whom she met when they both served on the management committee of Camden women’s assist, and whom she married in 2012.

She is survived by Marcia, their infants, Laura and Robert, her mom, and her siblings, Nicki and John.