Beginner's Guide to Family Law

Unique child custody book provides parent-friendly guidance

Your judge presides over an ecosystem of vultures feeding off the misery of children. Combined, these judges are responsible for a national ecosystem that generates tens of billions each year directly from the backs of children. Four billion of this comes directly from the federal government in terms of financial kickbacks for illegally awarding and illegally enforcing child support.

This book introduces you to the path we at Fix Family Courts are creating that leads to automatic 50/50 parenting plans where neither parent loses rights and where the child doesn't lose rights. This contrasts with the current system which deprives both parents of fundamental natural rights by default and always in every single case creates irreparable injury to the child.

The judges and their system will try to block you at every turn, and they have a grab bag of dirty underhanded tricks they use to accomplish this against most parents. You can avoid or overcome these roadblocks if you lay down a foundation and a strategy for protecting your rights and for protecting your child from a horrendous national system designed to generate billions through the suffering of your child.

First, you must absolutely take control over how your case is being framed and force it out of the default business as usual path. The current system survives off of commonly held misperceptions of the law based on 19th Century beliefs about families. The legal pillars of the current system were overturned in the early 1970's but family law never got the memo. We show you how to give family law the memo that in the 21st Century the constitution applies much more strongly to protect parents' and children's rights to live together as a family regardless of whether or not the child's parents are married or living together.

In the 21st Century, the constitution defines the basic building blocks of a family at the parent-child level and at the adult-adult level Each pairing is uniquely protected through the individual rights of each member. The constitution only protects the nuclear family as a collection of three constitutionally protected family units, a mother-child association, a father-child association, and an association between the child's parents in whatever form those parents choose to establish and maintain. And the constitution does NOT permit the State to punish the parents or the child simply because the parents choose a type of association the State disfavors.

But for the tens of billions of dollars feeding tens of thousands of vultures who depend upon the current corrupt system, it would have changed a long time ago.

• You are entitled to a fundamentally fair process.
• Judges intimidate attorneys into waiving your right to a fair process on your behalf.
• The degree of due process you are entitled to is different for different rights in different contexts.
• The bare minimum standard for due process, notice and a hearing, is insufficient in child custody proceedings.
• If you don't know what standard applies, then the proceeding is unfair.
• How do you hold the judge accountable to declaring the standard that is to be applied?
• How your judge plays of advisory child custody orders as legitimate.

• Must be established under the facts and circumstances of each case.
• State statutes cannot define minimum standards of federal due process.
• Your judge must apply full faith and credit to federal law.
• How to formally invoke protections for federal due process rights.
• Troxel is NOT a grandparents rights case and the opinion doesn't even contain a single sentence addressing the rights of grandparents.
• State courts have federal jurisdiction and a mandatory duty to protect your rights.
• How to fight for the clear and convincing evidentiary standard.
• Use written post hearing objections to protect your rights.

• The federal constitution is the supreme law of your state and NO law can exist outside its limits.
• Your judge swears an oath to protect your federal rights no matter what any family code statute or best interest policy says to the contrary.
• Many state constitutions clearly articulate this fact.
• It is the Supremacy Clause that requires your judge to give full faith and credit to federal law as supreme over all state law.
• If your judge rejects the Supremacy Clause, he or she cannot form a legitimate court.
• Family law is undeniably a state law concern but that does NOT permit a judge to violate federal law.

• The 14th Amendment imposes federal constitutional limitations on state actors taking state action under color of state law.
• Your judge is a state actor who is taking state action under the state's family code.
• Be clear that you expect the judge to act within federal limitations.
• If your judge claims not to be a state actor they cannot claim state immunity.
• The Supreme Court has declared in a child custody appel that child custody judges are state actors limited by the federal constitution.

• You are entitled to an adjudication of your constitutional rights before losing custody.
• A best interest determination is NOT an adjudication of rights.
• Why trial phases are important?
• Your judge carries the burden of proof.
• A child custody suit between fit parents cannot be to protect the child.
• The judge presumes away your rights but precisely when and how were your rights lost.
• It doesn't matter that that the State did NOT initiate the proceedings.
• Your child's rights mirror yours.
• Broad discretion is always insufficient to violate fundamental rights.
• Your child needs to be protected from the judge and the corrupt system.
• The source of your 50/50 rights.

• Your judge has no authority to violate your rights if he or she has not provided substantive protections for those rights first.
• When substantive rights are more precious than property rights, the clear and convincing evidentiary standard applies.
• The parenting plan and child support are censorship.
• Your attorney has a fiduciary duty to protect your rights.
• Care, custody, and control are privacy rights.
• Every court ordered parenting plan violates the child's rights.
• Rights are "individual" rights that cannot depend upon marriage or divorce.
• The constitution does guarantee 50/50 custody through the Least Restrictive Means Test.

• A way to better communicate jurisdictional issues.
• The state cannot establish jurisdiction to act in your child's interests.
• Best interest sounds great but is a house built upon sand.
• Courts cannot lawfully skip adjudication to make best interest decisions.
• Without adjudication, the court's orders are advisory opinions.
• Best interest gives the State a voice NOT the child.
• Interviewing child in chambers is unlawful.
• The child's lack of standing deprives the family code of a foundation in law.
• Divorce cannot create standing in child custody suits.
• Concrete injury, the essential element of any suit, doesn't exist in child custody.
• Does you state directly tie standing to subject matter jurisdiction?

• State defined duties to pay cannot avoid constitutional limitations on seizures.
• Compelled child support is illegitimate unless the state has proven that you failed to care for your child.
• Why you shouldn't ask for a fitness hearing.
• No child has a lawful claim to any percentage of a parent's income.
• The State reduces childcare to dollars, not fit parents, and not the constitution.

• Broad exploratory searches are always unlawful.
• The GAL is a spy for the court and a prosecutor you pay to prosecute you.
• The GAL can be sued for civil rights violations in federal court even if the state provides immunity.
• GALs are conducting exploratory searches that unlawfully invade privacy rights.
• GALs exist to provide the judge with an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway.
• GALs will add an additional lawyer of costs to everything you do with the court.
• The 4th Amendment protects you from having your money seized to pay a GAL.

• Protections against censorship, while based on rights, actually differ from traditional rights protections.
• Unequal parenting plans enhance the speech of one parent and reduce the speech of the other parent which is a classic censorship scheme.
• The Supreme Court has extensively held that money spent on speech is protected as speech therefore, child support is speech.
• Discretionary spending on children supports, enhances, and enforces parental speech.
• The child custody judge's viewpoint regarding your parenting abilities cannot justify censorship.
• The federal government very literally pays your state to violate your rights through child support awards and enforcement.

• Not only does the First Amendment protect your right to speak freely, it also protects your right NOT to be compelled to say what you don't want to say.
• Child support is a seizure of your money to pay for speech you don't approve of which is classic unlawful compelled speech.
• The State, through your judge, is speaking to your child unlawfully.

• Comparing divorced parents to married parents is not only the wrong comparison, it is an unlawful comparison.
• If your State wants procedural rules in child custody cases that significantly differ from other civil cases, the State must justify those differences.
• Some judges want to change the corrupt system, you need to make it easy for your judge to help you, if he or she is looking for a way.

• You are entitled to a judge who has not pre-determined to rule against you but best interest requires the judge to agree to rule against you.
• This one is in your state’s code of judicial conduct so use it.
• Show your judge that he or she is vulnerably by showing how your judge's immunity from civil rights suit is directly tied to their being neutral and independent.
• No state legislature can command a judge to violate their oath to the constitution.

• You have a fundamental right to access neutral and impartial state courts to adjudicate your rights in compliance with constitutional mandates.
• When your judge agrees to make a best interest determination for the state, he or she denies you access to a legitimate court where you can challenge that determination.
• Don't ask for best interest, ask for protection of existing rights.
• You cannot be compelled to waive rights to access a court.
• Your attorney is more vulnerable to judicial corruption than you are.

• Your ex has NO legal claim against your parental rights, only the State can attack your rights in court.
• Attacking your rights in court opens your ex and their attorney to a civil rights suit for damages.
• Your state legislature cannot establish a cause of action against your federal rights.
• Knowing the source of your parental rights makes this point more clear.
• Your child custody court is operating from 19th Century overturned beliefs about family and family law.
• Your rights cannot depend on either marriage or divorce.

• Your child absolutely has federal constitutional rights that are fundamental.
• These rights protect their association with you.
• Best interest violates your child's fundamental rights which cannot be best for your child.
• This concept is a rich source of creating judicial errors that can be overturned.
• Parents can limit their own child's rights with best interest choices, states and their judges may not.

• When a judge violates a child's fundamental rights, that judge irreparably injures the child.
• How can it be in any child's best interests for a judge to irreparably injure them?
• Custody hearings do NOT provide adequate due process protections for a fitness holding.

This book has introduced you to concepts of how your rights are protected against child custody court actions, if only you assert those rights. This book provides examples of how to assert those rights through formal objections. This book shows you how to set simple constitutional traps for your judge who will almost certainly walk right into the trap. These traps are designed to neuter the judge's ability to unlawfully limit your rights. Objections are a powerful tool for you, if you use them. These objections communicate to your judge that you know your rights and you mean business.