Mississippi legislation kicked around 2 significant ideas for changes in Family Law. Both failed to become law in the State.
This “was the year” for Irretrievable Breakdown, Mississippi’s answer to No Fault Divorce.
In MS, you do NOT have a right to a divorce. You either have to have fault grounds that you can prove to the satisfaction of the Chancellor or have an agreement with your spouse to ALL issues. 48 other states have a No Fault Divorce process. MS does not.
Thirteenth. Upon application of either party, the court may
grant a divorce when the court finds there has been an
irretrievable breakdown of the marriage and that further attempts
at reconciliation are impractical or futile and not in the best
interests of the parties or family.
Secondly, a Joint Custody bill was proposed. There were several iterations of this legislation, but the gist of it was that the Court was to assume that Joint Physical Custody was in the best interest of the child when parents could not agree (and, even if they could) and if the Court found Joint Physical Custody was not in the best interest of the child it had to state why. (There were some issues with the proposed legislation as it was drafted, but this Bill found some traction and was discussed and bandied about for weeks…ultimately to no avail).
(2) * * * (a) There shall be a presumption, rebuttable by a
preponderance of evidence, that joint custody and equally shared
parenting time is in the best interest of the child. If the court
does not grant joint custody and/or equally shared parenting time,
the court shall construct a parenting time schedule which
maximizes the time each parent has with the child and ensuring the
best interest of the child is met.
(b) Upon petition of both parents, the court may grant
legal and/or physical custody to one parent.
Both bills failed and there are limited changes to MS Family Law. A blog for another day.
Matthew Thompson is a Family Law Attorney in MS and is in favor of some common sense changes in Mississippi Law.