The Superior Court held that disputed primary-physical-custody issues could not be finally resolved through Blair County’s hearing-officer process and remanded for a judicial hearing.
The Superior Court held that grandparents lacked standing under Section 5325(1) because the surviving parent still exercised parental control after the other parent died.
The Wyoming Supreme Court summarily affirmed a divorce decree granting Mother sole custody of ten children and assigning nearly all marital debt to incarcerated Father, holding that Father’s nine-issue opening brief contained no cogent argument — just general legal principles with no case-specific analysis — and that his reply brief improperly raised four new issues while failing to respond to Mother’s arguments. Attorney fees under W.R.A.P. 10.05 were declined as a matter of discretion, but costs were awarded.
The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed a Park County divorce decree awarding Mother primary custody and $624,500 in equitable distribution, holding that Father’s W.R.C.P. 35 motion for psychological evaluations was untimely and lacked good cause, that the district court properly reached assets Father transferred to his nonprofit during the proceedings under the badges-of-fraud doctrine from Breitenstine, and that Father was barred by invited error from challenging the shared custody arrangement for the family dog.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court vacated four years of guardianship proceedings and remanded for dismissal, holding that the Probate and Family Court never had subject matter jurisdiction over a newborn’s custody under the Massachusetts Child Custody Jurisdiction Act (MCCJA) because New Hampshire—not Massachusetts—was the child’s home state, and the concurrent New Hampshire proceeding independently barred the Massachusetts action under G. L. c. 209B, § 2(d).
The North Carolina Court of Appeals vacated a review-hearing order ceasing reunification efforts, holding that N.C.G.S. § 7B-906.2(b) reserves that power exclusively for permanency planning hearings; the trial court’s failure to schedule a permanency planning hearing within the statutory thirty-day window was an error but not prejudicial on appeal, with mandamus the proper real-time remedy.
The Seventh Court of Appeals reversed a post-answer default judgment in a divorce case, holding that a pro se defendant received no notice of the trial setting after her attorneys withdrew without serving her by certified mail as required by Rule 10, and that subsequent electronic-only service failed to comply with the trial court’s own notice order and could not trigger the Rule 21a presumption of receipt.
The Montana Supreme Court affirmed a protection order protecting the petitioner from the respondent but reversed the child-related provisions—including the elimination of all parenting contact—holding that Montana Code Annotated § 40-15-204(4) requires child-specific findings that the child was a victim of, witnessed, or was endangered by abuse, and that the court must explain why supervised visitation would not adequately address the proven safety concerns before imposing a total contact ban.