Jurisdiction, Counsel Fees in Child Custody Revisited by Court

In November 2014, the Pennsylvania Superior Court case of T.A.M. v. S.L.M., 104 A.3d 30 (Pa. Super. 2014), addressed modification of a child custody order under the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA) where the parties and the child no longer reside in the state that issued the custody order. In September 2014, for the first time, the Superior Court analyzed the counsel fees section of the Child Custody Act enacted in 2011, in the case of Chen v. Saidi, 100 A.3d 587 (Pa. Super. 2014). The recent case of A.L.-S. v. B.S., 2015 PA Super 123 (May 27, 2015), addressed both issues again.

In my article on the T.A.M. case, “Court Analyzes Jurisdiction to Modify Custody Order Under UCCJEA,” published Jan. 13 in The Legal, I highlighted that under the UCCJEA the primary focus is on the home state of the child regarding jurisdiction. The UCCJEA defines “home state” as: “the state in which the child lived with a parent or a person acting as a parent for at least six consecutive months immediately before the commencement of a child custody proceeding.” I further reiterated that in order to avoid forum-shopping and multiple states entering multiple custody orders, the UCCJEA also emphasizes exclusive continuing jurisdiction. In the T.A.M. case, a Tennessee court granted the maternal grandmother, a resident of Erie, custody of her grandchild. The maternal grandmother continued to reside with the grandchild in Pennsylvania. The father of the child then moved from Tennessee to Florida and the mother had been presumed no longer living. More than a year after the grandmother had custody of the grandchild in Pennsylvania, the father filed a custody action in Pennsylvania seeking custody of the child. The trial court in that case dismissed the matter, holding that Pennsylvania lacked jurisdiction to modify the Tennessee order because the Tennessee court did not relinquish jurisdiction. The Superior Court reversed the trial court’s decision because it held that the child’s home state was in Pennsylvania and no parent or person acting as a parent still resided in Tennessee. Because of this, under the UCCJEA, Pennsylvania had jurisdiction to modify the order of Tennessee.