Justia Civil Procedure Opinion Summaries

Brandon and Brandi Kelly married on April 20, 2015, and had a child on June 9, 2015. Brandon filed for divorce on May 30, 2017. This appeal primarily concerned their disputes regarding the division of property and attorney fees. Prior to marriage, Brandon and Brandi entered into a prenuptial agreement (“the PNA”) seeking to establish their rights to various items of property. Brandi and Brandon were represented by separate counsel during the negotiation and execution of the PNA. Before signing the PNA, Brandi reviewed Brandon’s 2014 tax return. Brandi’s attorney requested changes to the PNA’s definitions of separate and community property, which were made. Brandi expressly waived her right to review other financial documentation concerning Brandon’s assets and signed the PNA. During the pendency of the divorce action, and relevant to this appeal, Brandon filed four motions for partial summary judgment and Brandi filed two motions for partial summary judgment, each of which required interpretation of various provisions of the PNA. After review, the Idaho Supreme Court affirmed in part, and reversed in part, certain district court decisions with respect to the parties' PNA. The Supreme Court found the district court erred (1) in affirming the magistrate court’s decision that the PNA barred Brandi from requesting attorney fees for child custody, visitation and support matters; (2) in affirming the magistrate court’s summary judgment decision concluding that Brandon’s payments from EIRMC were his separate property; and (3) when it failed to vacate the award of attorney fees to Brandon for his contempt motions, but did not err when it affirmed the magistrate court’s other deductions from Brandi’s separate property award. View "Kelly v. Kelly" on Justia Law

Without notice to appellant A.I. (mother of the minor R.O.), the juvenile court followed its usual practice of converting what was scheduled as a contested jurisdictional confirmation hearing into an uncontested jurisdictional hearing because mother did not appear as ordered. It did so over mother’s counsel’s objection. The Court of Appeal concluded this routine practice denied mother her due process rights. The Court therefore reversed and remanded the matter for a new jurisdictional hearing. View "In re R.O." on Justia Law

Jennifer Monegan was the birth mother of a child born in 2011, and Scout Monegan was the child’s adoptive father. Gregory and Julie Husby were the child’s maternal grandparents and lived in Oregon. Jennifer and her child lived with the Husbys for a time after the child’s birth; the Husbys provided childcare and were significantly involved in the child’s life until he was two and a half years old. However, Jennifer’s relationship with the Husbys began to deteriorate after she started dating Scout. After Jennifer and Scout married in 2013, the Husbys petitioned for visitation in Oregon, where all of the parties lived at the time. Jennifer and the Husbys came to a mediated agreement providing, among other things, that the Husbys would have visitation with the child one weekend per month for 32 hours, as well as unlimited written and telephonic contact.The Monegans moved to Alaska in March 2018. In-person visits occurred less frequently after the relocation: between March 2018 and August 2019 the Husbys visited the child seven times. The Husbys tried to maintain their relationship with the child through letters, gifts, and weekly phone calls, and claimed they were able to do so through the summer of 2019. In September 2019 the Monegans filed a complaint in the superior court to terminate the Husbys’ visitation rights, alleging it was not in the child’s best interests to continue visitation. The Husbys counterclaimed for modification of the stipulated order to allow “reasonable visitation” with the child. The Husbys then moved to enforce the stipulated visitation order. The Alaska Supreme Court concluded AS 25.20.065(a) governed the motion to modify the grandparents' visitation, and when a grandparent seeks visitation over a parent’s objection, the grandparent must show clear and convincing evidence that the parent was unfit or that denying visitation will be detrimental to the child. If the court awards visitation rights to a grandparent, and the parent later moves to modify the grandparent’s visitation rights, so long as the parents were protected by the parental preference rule in the proceedings resulting in the grandparent’s visitation rights, the "parental preference rule" does not apply in later proceedings to modify those visitation rights. Having clarified the applicable legal standards, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded the superior court’s order in this case because it was error to decide the motions to modify the grandparents’ visitation rights without first holding a hearing on disputed issues of fact. View "Husby v. Monegan" on Justia Law

Tuwanda Williams and John Williams, Jr., filed a “Joint Motion to Dismiss Fault Grounds and Consent to Divorce on Grounds of Irreconcilable Differences” and submitted for review a judgment of divorce based on irreconcilable differences and a divorce agreement. Shortly thereafter, Tuwanda changed her mind. She withdrew her consent to the divorce agreement and also withdrew her consent to the divorce based on irreconcilable differences. John moved to enforce the divorce agreement. The chancellor found that Tuwanda timely withdrew her consent to the irreconcilable-differences divorce but that the divorce agreement was an enforceable contract binding on both Tuwanda and John. The chancellor granted John’s motion to enforce the divorce agreement and entered what he called a “final judgment” incorporating the agreement. Tuwanda appealed. Because the order entitled “final judgment” was not a final, appealable judgment, the Mississippi Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to review the appeal. Accordingly, the appeal was dismissed. View "Williams v. Williams" on Justia Law

As relevant here, a trial court has reason to know that a child is an Indian child when “[a]ny participant in the proceeding, officer of the court involved in the proceeding, Indian Tribe, Indian organization, or agency informs the court that it has discovered information indicating that the child is an Indian child.” In this dependency and neglect case, the juvenile court terminated Mother’s parental rights with respect to E.A.M. Mother appealed, complaining that the court had failed to comply with Indian Child Welfare Act (“ICWA”) by not ensuring that the petitioning party, the Denver Human Services Department (“the Department”), had provided notice of the proceeding to the tribes that she and other relatives had identified as part of E.A.M.’s heritage. The Department and the child’s guardian ad litem responded that the assertions of Indian heritage by Mother and other relatives had not given the juvenile court reason to know that the child was an Indian child. Rather, they maintained, such assertions had merely triggered the due diligence requirement in section 19-1-126(3), and here, the Department had exercised due diligence. A division of the court of appeals agreed with Mother, vacated the termination judgment, and remanded with directions to ensure compliance with ICWA’s notice requirements. The Colorado Supreme Court reversed, finding that "mere assertions" of a child's Indian heritage, without more, were not enough to give a juvenile court "reason to know" that the child was an Indian child. Here, the juvenile court correctly found that it didn’t have reason to know that E.A.M. is an Indian child. Accordingly, it properly directed the Department to exercise due diligence in gathering additional information that would assist in determining whether there was reason to know that E.A.M. is an Indian child. View "Colorado in interest of E.A.M. v. D.R.M." on Justia Law

Elouise Harber and Delores Williams filed cross-petitions to be appointed as guardians of two children. The trial court ordered them to exchange lists of the witnesses they intended to call, specifically including party witnesses; it also specifically ordered that they would not be permitted to call a witness who was not on their lists. Harber failed to exchange a witness list. When the case was called for trial, her counsel explained that her only witness was Harber herself, and that counsel mistakenly believed that the pretrial order did not require her to list party witnesses. Pursuant to its pretrial order, the trial court dismissed Harber’s petition and granted Williams’s petition. In the published portion of its opinion, the Court of Appeal held that, under the circumstances of this case, the trial court abused its discretion by imposing a terminating sanction View "Guardianship of A.H." on Justia Law

Appellant made a request for pendente lite attorney fees was made early in the marriage dissolution proceedings and had been pending for over a year when the trial started. By that time, Appellant was unemployed and representing herself. Nonetheless, her request for pendente lite attorney fees was never ruled on by the family court. Instead, the court waited until after the trial to address attorney fees in its final judgment of reserved issues.   The Fifth Appellate District explained that Appellant has demonstrated the family court’s failures to comply with its obligations under section 2030 were prejudicial. To remedy this prejudicial error, the court explained it must reverse the judgment (which places all reserved issues at large) and remand the case for further proceedings. Those proceedings shall include a hearing on Appellant’s request for pendente lite attorney fees and a decision on that request before the new trial is started. Because over four years have passed since Appellant filed her May 2018 request for an order awarding pendente lite attorney fees and costs, the court shall allow Appellant to file a new request for order and shall allow Blair to file a response before hearing the request for pendente lite attorney fees and costs. View "Marriage of Knox" on Justia Law

The issue this case presented for the Vermont Supreme Court's review centered on whether a non-resident plaintiff could obtain a relief-from-abuse (RFA) order under Vermont’s Abuse Prevention Act. Mother and father were married in Massachusetts in 2015. Together, they had a daughter, age six, and a son, age five. The family’s relationship had been affected at times by father’s violent behavior and by mother’s substance abuse. Since 2019, father has lived in Dummerston, Vermont, while mother has maintained residency in Massachusetts. The couple remained married. After a November 2017 incident, mother reported father's abuse to police, and he was prosecuted for felony domestic violence. His contact with mother and the children was limited by a Massachusetts court. In June 2018, father sought emergency custody of the children in Massachusetts. He alleged that the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families had investigated mother for child neglect and that mother had been arraigned on a DUI, second offense, in early July 2018. A Massachusetts court held that despite father’s history of domestic violence, mother’s substance abuse impaired her ability to parent, and awarded custody to father and ordered that mother’s time with the children be restricted to supervised visits. The order also allowed father to move with the children to Vermont. Mother visited the children in Vermont, and on several occasions, father drove the children to Massachusetts to visit mother. When mother and father were getting along, mother had father’s permission to spend the night at his house. Mother’s time with the children was often unsupervised by father. They often spent time with the children together. Between January and April 2021, mother and father reconciled their relationship. By May 2021, this reconciliation had ended. Father told mother she could no longer see the children during unsupervised periods. However, mother still apparently spent considerably more time with the children than the Massachusetts court order allowed. Father subjected the children to corporal punishment and inappropriate outbursts of anger, some of which was witnessed by mother. In August 2021, she filed a complaint for an emergency RFA in Vermont; a Vermont court issued a temporary RFA order the same day. Father moved to dismiss the RFA order, contending that because mother was a resident of Massachusetts, she could not proceed under the Abuse Prevention Act. The family division concluded that mother could obtain both an emergency and final RFA order against father. The Vermont Supreme Court affirmed the family division's order. View "Bacigalupo v. Bacigalupo" on Justia Law

Shelby Finnson appealed a judgment awarding primary residential responsibility of the parties’ minor child to Jacob Kershaw. She claimed the district court’s findings were unsupported by the record; the court’s parenting time decision was unreasoned; the court erred when it allowed Kershaw to call an undisclosed witness for purposes of rebuttal; and the presiding judge erred because he failed to certify himself as familiar with the record. Finding no reversible error, the North Dakota Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. View "Kershaw v. Finnson, et al." on Justia Law

T.T. (Mother) challenged a juvenile court’s finding that the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) did not apply to the dependency proceedings concerning her son, Dominick D. She argued the juvenile court failed to ensure that San Bernardino County Children and Family Services (CFS) discharged its duty of initial inquiry into Dominick’s possible Indian ancestry under California Welfare & Institutions Code section 224.2(b). To this, the Court of Appeal agreed, but declined to address the parties’ arguments concerning harmlessness, because ICWA inquiry and notice errors did not warrant reversal of the juvenile court’s jurisdictional or dispositional findings and orders other than the finding that ICWA did not apply. The Court accordingly vacated that finding and remanded for compliance with ICWA and related California law, but otherwise affirmed. View "In re Dominick D." on Justia Law