The ease and speed of travel, the high emotion of divorce, and the determination of some parents to have things their way, have taken custody fights across state lines and cross country.  The motivation is to get a time-sharing plan changed by a court in another state that will, as the absconding parent hopes, give them custody of a child while cutting off all contact with the other parent.

This approach to avoiding a disliked judgment by fleeing to a court of another state has little chance of succeeding.  Virtually every state in the country has adopted a uniform law designed to put an end to this chaos by ensuring the judgment of one state will be honored by all the others.

Called the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, it is targeted at keeping time-sharing and support orders intact and preventing one parent from forcing the other to re-litigate the same issues in a court hundreds or thousands of miles away.  The Act protects the judgments of courts having original jurisdiction over the parties and the child, while putting an end to the expense and unfairness of causing a party to have to respond to another court far from home.

It also applies to a situation that arises when a parent living out of state refuses to return a child after visitation and seeks to modify the previous judgment in the new state.  When the case is filed, the trial judges of each state will review the original final judgment and decide which of them has jurisdiction and should hear the case.  More likely than not, an order will issue directing the return of the child back to his/her home state.