FAMILY LAW ARTICLES
Move Aways In A Family Law Context
Hello, Carla Hartley here. Happy New Year 2021. I hope this year is better for you than the last year. I’m going to start off this year with a discussion about move aways in a family law context.
Moving away in a family law context is most easily broken out into two different scenarios. Either you have a minor child or you do not have a minor child at issue in your case. If you do not have a minor child, you can pretty much move wherever you like. There are exceptions to this. For instance, if you’re the sole occupant of the former family residence and you want to move, you have a duty to not leave that house vacant. That’s a significant community asset so you don’t want to be committing waste of a community asset. For the most part the courts not going to say you cannot possibly move. The court is going to require that you take steps to be responsible in your move.
It is different if minor children are involved and I’m going to break this down into two further issues. If you have a minor child and you’re living in the state with a minor child and the opposing party also lives in the state whether this is a custody case only, admitting parentage, it’s not a marriage or whether it’s a dissolution case, whether it’s pre-judgment, post-judgment, you’re going to want to talk to counsel.
Now, move aways in the state of California are generally disfavored, but there are ways to still get you out of here. I think that you need to look at this with an eye to recognizing that the court really wants what is best for your child, but the court must balance that with your constitutional right to relocate. The only caveat I have here is you might want to move before filing any case with the court and even then if you filed before any case is moved with the court, you’re going to want to be smart about it. You’re going to want to talk to an attorney because there are things that you need to know and things that the opposing party can do to pull you back into the state if he for instance or she has not given consent to the move, if the child has been located here or domiciled here for most of its life and jurisdiction is going to be here, you’re going to want to be looking at certain time frames to elapse first.
If you’re moving after a case has been filed with the family court, you must get permission from the family court to go and to do that you don’t want to just walk in and say “Hey, I want to move.” There is a long list of criteria that the court must consider before granting your request to move away. So you do need an attorney if you have a minor child you want to move. If you are in the process of a dissolution proceeding and you want to move with or without a minor child, you should check with the attorney and see if it is feasible and if it is advisable and you should also make sure you’re looking at the cost-benefit of the move. There’s occasionally a really good reason to stay and sometimes that turns out to be the prospect of not having your move away granted at all because you don’t meet the legal requirements and the other prospect is maybe it’s financially unwise to make the move.
I will continue this series a little bit more in-depth. Today is just an overview and as always I cannot, cannot distill all the experience and all the education that we have and the entire family code and the entire body of case law on this issue into a short series of videos, but I can give you a good overview and that’s my intention. I hope this has been helpful. I hope you are off to a good New Year, and I will see you soon.
