NPO: Why Temporary Custody Orders Are a Big Deal

Article here. Excerpt:

'An Ohio National Parents Organization member recently wrote to me to let me know what responses he’d received from the Ohio legislators he’d written to. He was writing to advocate for a presumption of true shared parenting during temporary orders. “True shared parenting” means joint legal decision-making authority (legal custody) and substantially equal parenting time (physical custody). One of our esteemed legislators blew the issue off, informing this man that (as the man reported to me), “temporary orders are simply temporary, and that they are not the final orders that the magistrate can rule to set what is in the best interest of the child.”

Well, of course, temporary orders are temporary. Hard to argue with that. But it’s a terrible mistake to conclude that they don’t matter much. They are vitally important.

In 1999, I published my “Parental Rights and Due Process,” which argued that doctrine explicitly endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court implied that parents had a fundamental constitutional right to shared parenting. In that paper, I focused on shared parenting during temporary orders because those orders are based on almost no evidence; they provide almost nothing in the way of substantive due process. I anticipated that some people would say: “What’s the big deal? They’re only temporary orders.”'

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