Graham.Law Blog

The Colorado Supreme Court rarely issues decisions pertaining to ICWA, or the Indian Child Welfare Act requirements, and as a result, this is only our second blog post on ICWA (the first was back in 2020, pertaining to the applicability of ICWA to adoption cases). A brand new decision, E.A.M.,…

Once a family law judge determines parenting time, it is not easy to change the majority residential parent. A permanent custody change requires either the other parent’s agreement, consent to the child being integrated into the parent’s home, or endangerment. It is this middle factor which was at issue in…

This was unexpected. It’s not often that an attempt to get around child hearsay rules through child testimony resulted in a dispute over a child being a witness in a divorce case making national headlines! Yet again, the tortured divorce proceedings between Hollywood superstars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt provide…

Any family law attorney will at some stage have initiated or defended against a motion to restrict parenting time, which is what Colorado calls an emergency custody proceeding. While most child custody motions move at a normal judicial pace, a motion to restrict is addressed almost immediately, with a same-day…

Family law decisions at the U.S. Supreme Court are rare, since domestic relations law is almost entirely governed by state law, not federal law. But there are enough areas of federal interest (military retirement, Hague Convention international child custody issues, and ICWA, or the Indian Child Welfare Act) that we…

The parents leave their divorce or parenting hearing with joint decision-making. Then the arguments start – when is joint decision-making truly required, and when is a decision a day-to-day decision made by the parent then-exercising parenting time? This blog post was precipitated by a real-world dispute which just arose in…

Colorado law authorizes judges to appoint, with the consent of both parties, a decision-maker to assist the parents in making parental decisions when they are unable to agree. But unlike with a judge or an arbitrator, the decision-maker does not have unlimited authority, but instead has a very narrow statutory…

Contempt is one of those areas of family law which seems easy – one party is violating the order, so is found to be in remedial contempt of court. However, the reality is far from simple, and as we just wrote about in a recent blog, not every legal right…

Ah yes – contempt of court! Your opponent violated a court order, and you, as the aggrieved party, are going to get justice at last. After all, surely it is true that every legal right has a remedy (a Latin phrase, Ubi jus, ibi remedium, which is sometimes misquoted as…

Colorado has a statute allowing a third party nonparent to seek visitation (i.e. “parenting time”) with a child under certain circumstances in an Allocation of Parental Responsibilities (APR) action. Typically, the nonparent will be someone who has cared for the child for at least 182 days, but a lesser-used provision…