On February 6, 2010, I posted an article entitled, “They Fight for America and Upon Return Must Fight for Their Children”. The article addressed the issue of active duty servicemen and servicewomen returning from overseas assignments, often in the Middle East, to find that their former spouses were using the overseas military assignment as a “substantial change in circumstances” to obtain a change in custody of their minor children. At the time of that posting, Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, was trying to persuade Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, to agree that active duty military parents should receive child custody protection while they were deployed out of the country. The Department of the Defense had opposed this protection and Turner’s proposed legislation.
On February 11, 2011, Secretary of Defense Gates responded to Representative Michael Turner in a brief letter which said that his Department “was/are willing to consider whether appropriate legislation can be crafted that provides Service members with a federal uniform standard of protection in cases where it is established that military service is the sole factor involved in a child custody decision involving a Service member.” Click here to read his letter.
On February 16, 2011, Congressman … Read More... “BREAKING NEWS: Secretary of Defense Gates Changes Position to Protect Custodial Parents Deployed Overseas!”
In recent years there has been a steady and alarming increase in the use of false allegations of vague, unsupported claims of domestic violence and even vaguer claims of child abuse, used solely in an attempt to find a shortcut to a presumed better position in custody cases. What is more alarming is the observation that more often than not the attorneys of record for the litigants making these claims have been those unschooled in and relatively new to the family law arena, who have chosen to step outside their actual specialty and add a minor “division” of family law to their practices. Often, a new, young, unskilled associate is added to the practice to handle these family law issues.
Here is an update about our client, Kent Swaim, whose two sons were abducted to Japan by their mother, published in the DDN on September 8, 2010.
On October 24, 2009, our Ohio Family Law Blog published an article entitled, 
If you are planning a foreign vacation this summer, you had better plan ahead to determine all the necessary travel documents that you will need. This can be a much more complex issue than one might think. A good place to start is the 
For those of you that read our Ohio Family Law Blog regularly, you are familiar with problems that may arise when your children travel internationally. Specifically, one parent may abduct your child to his or her home country. Another issue may be that you send your child to visit his or her parent in another country and that parent refuses to allow the child to return. If the country that the child is in is a signatory to the Hague Convention, there are mechanisms that may assist the parent in obtaining the child’s return. This process, however, can be costly, time consuming, and produce uncertain results. So you ask, what steps can you take to protect your child from ever being placed in that position?
What is an in camera interview? The phrase “in camera” is a Latin term defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as: “In chambers; in private.” The interview does not involve a camera or a videotape at all! If a party is asking for the Court to have an in camera interview of a minor child, the request is for the Judge or Magistrate to interview the minor child privately with neither parent or his/her attorney being present. An Appellate Court in Michigan said it very well years ago . . .