Up, Up and Away

My custody trial last week was a move away case.  That means that one parent wants to move from the geographic area and take the child with them.  In this case, one parent had to move to Hawaii for work. The other parent was staying in Maryland.  Unless we want to locate the child in Iowa or Kansas,  there's really no compromise: someone has to win and someone has to lose.

As anyone who toils here in the Trenches will tell you, move away cases are our most difficult cases.  First, because there is no place for compromise.  Unless someone simply gives up, the case is going to trial.  Second, because if you are representing the parent who is moving away, the burden of proof is impossibly high.  In a modification of custody case, the presumption is that if the child is doing well, staying where they are is in their best interest.  That's how the court usually defines stability, which is always presumed to be in a child's best interest.  If both parents are reasonably fit parents, with only the usual parental failings, the parent who is moving away has to prove that what they have to offer by moving the child away is superior enough to maintaining the status quo that it warrants uprooting the child from what it knows.  As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to meet that burden of proof.  Still, we have to try as hard as we can to do it, because it's what we do.  Here in the Trenches.