The VLW Blog

A Vermont judge has issued an arrest warrant for the missing mother in a two-state, same-sex custody battle.
Family Court Judge William Cohen ordered the arrest of Lisa Miller, who has refused to turn over her 7-year-old daughter Isabella pursuant to the judge’s custody order favoring Miller’s former partner, Janet Jenkins, reports the Rutland Herald .
Miller’s [...]

[Read more →]

The Virginia Court of Appeals upheld today the enforcement of a custody order from North Carolina in favor of a male homosexual couple.
Both partners contributed sperm to artificially inseminate a Minnesota woman who agreed to be a surrogate mother.
The relatonship between the mother and the partners deteriorated, and a North Carolina judge resolved a custody [...]

[Read more →]

The legal wrangling over visitation for 7-year-old Isabella Miller continues.
Isabella was the child born to Lisa Miller in April 2002 after she and Janet Jenkins had entered into a civil union in Vermont.
Miller subsequently sought to have the union dissolved, and Jenkins was awarded visitation rights as part of the dissolution.
However, Miller moved to Virginia [...]

[Read more →]

The Virginia Supreme Court’s remand of a grandparent custody case has raised questions about who gets to award attorney’s fees, according to four judges of the Court of Appeals.
In its Sept. 12 opinion in Lynchburg Division of Social Services v. Cook, the high court ordered the Court of Appeals to send the custody case back [...]

[Read more →]

A divorce court cannot order that custody will automatically change from mom to dad if the mother decides to move out of Virginia or more than 30 miles from the father’s home, the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled today.
In Demuth v. Demuth, an appellate panel reversed a Prince William County Circuit Court decision that granted [...]

[Read more →]

Virginia Court of Appeals Judge D. Arthur Kelsey couldn’t help but imply that Robert Thurman Pilson might not be the best candidate for a home electronic monitoring program.
Not only was Pilson sentenced to the mandatory minimum one-year term for driving as an habitual offender, his criminal record includes convictions for escape, eluding police, resisting arrest, [...]

[Read more →]

What part of de novo don’t you understand?
That was the question the Virginia Court of Appeals had for Colonial Heights Circuit Judge Timothy J. Hauler.
A mother appealed a juvenile and domestic relations district court’s award of custody of her minor child to its father. At the beginning of the custody hearing Hauler told the mother’s [...]

[Read more →]

Virginia Solicitor General William E. Thro unsuccessfully asserted the sovereignty of the commonwealth in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of a lesbian mother who is attempting to sever the parental rights of her former partner.
In an amicus brief in the case of Miller-Jenkins v. Miller-Jenkins, Record No. 06-1110, Thro cited four [...]

[Read more →]

A papa tried a gender reversal on that truism when he asked a divorce judge to switch custody from the mother to the dad, who wanted to relocate to Florida.
The divorce judge said evidence showed the father’s response to a “strained relationship” with his daughter was to set ever stricter limits on the girl’s behavior [...]

[Read more →]