ABSTRACT
In 1891, in Barnardo v. McHugh, the House of Lords for the first time recognised that the mother of an illegitimate child had the same rights to custody as the parents of legitimate children. The case arose from Dr Barnardo’s efforts to prevent a Catholic mother from taking her son out of his Protestant Homes. Barnardo built his case not only around existing case law but also on an attack on Mrs McHugh’s moral character, to show her unfitness as a mother. The gambit backfired, and the law was reshaped on the back of the court’s evaluation of Barnardo’s own conduct. As this study shows, the law was shaped here not simply by doctrinal deduction, but by public contests over what counted as moral conduct.
