New Jersey laws on relocation of a child (also called “removal” in interstate applications) may be on the precipice of significant change, which may lead to a flurry of new legal challenges for parents with primary residential custody of a child seeking to relocate.
New Jersey has a long history of evolving attitudes regarding the rights of separated/divorced parents in relocation cases. Of importance to this article, in 2001, Baures v. Lewis, 167 N.J. 91 (2001), became and remains to this day the seminal case relating to relocation of the primary residential custodial parent from New Jersey. In Baures, the primary residential parent sought to relocate from New Jersey to Wisconsin with the parties’ son. The New Jersey Supreme Court created what many currently deem to be a low threshold of evidence necessary to achieve a presumption in favor of relocation, by simply requiring the party seeking relocation to provide a “good faith” basis for the relocation and that the move would not be harmful to the child’s interest. The court even noted that “[t]he initial burden of the moving party is not a particularly onerous one.” Id. at 118. The court delineated 12 factors for courts to utilize in determining whether removal would be harmful to the child’s interest.
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