CHILD SUPPORT ENFORCEMENT –
USIFA – REGISTRATION-INTERSTATE MODIFICATION – APPEALS – RULES 5A:18, 5A:20 – LEE v. LEE – NEW TAKE ON “SEEN AND
OBJECTED”. The subtleties and complexities that bedevil lawyers trying to
litigate cases under the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act, §§ 20-88.32 –
82 here in Virginia, show up with a vengeance in Moncrief v. DCSE, 60 Va. App. 721, 732 S.E.2d 714 (10/9/12). There
the parties, the lawyers and the circuit court below wrestled with those
complexities and the Court of Appeals patiently sorts it all out. The defendant
father argued that registration of the North Carolina order by Virginia
perverted the process, modifying his child support obligation by extending it,
which registration and interstate enforcement is not supposed to do. The short
answer to all this from the Court of Appeals is that the registration can’t be
overturned now, and it has to embody exactly what the North Carolina court did in 1997, even if that court acted
improperly by turning an order from New York (where liability extends to age
21) into a Carolina order. But perhaps the biggest news – if this precedent
should happen to hold – is that the Court of Appeals, perhaps wanting to hear
this case, rejected the appellee DCSE’s argument that the father should be out
of court because the order below was endorsed “Seen and Objected To” for
reasons stated in oral argument and noted on the face of the appealed order. This,
the Court of Appeals says this time, is enough: it preserves the claim, because
after all, the appellant made the trial court aware of his position below. He
had written pleadings setting forth his objections and arguments against the
registration, he had filed some sort of objections three months before that
final order, and these are exactly the same
arguments he now makes on appeal. And although such common-sense reasoning has
never cut any ice for many years now, since Lee
v. Lee first came down, all of this has to be enough, the Court of Appeals
says, and thus it complies with Rule 5A:18. Then DCSE tried a 5A:20 (c)
objection that father made no clear or exact reference to the pages where he
had reserved each assignment of error and the pages in the appendix that showed
each fact in his Statement of Facts. But the Court of Appeals, now on a roll,
says that the appellant’s failure to adhere strictly to the requirements of
Rule 5A:20 (c) were “insignificant and not so substantial as to preclude us
from addressing the merits of the case.” Sure it might look like the father had
a good argument because the 1997 North Carolina order improperly extended the
duration of his support obligation for three years, essentially turning a North
Carolina order into a New York order, doing something North Carolina law
doesn’t allow -- but when a new state registers a foreign order, they can only
register it like it is, and that makes it “the controlling order.” Well
wouldn’t this be a case where North Carolina didn’t properly have jurisdiction to do a thing like that? Not
so, the Court of Appeals explains, because New York lost continuing exclusive
jurisdiction when everybody moved out of New York, so North Carolina had the
jurisdiction to do this, and the fact that the new court followed New York law
and not North Carolina law and ended up extending a support obligation beyond
Carolina limits can’t be challenged now (as it could if North Carolina had not
had jurisdiction). North Carolina got continuing exclusive jurisdiction when
the whole family moved there, and the Carolina court did not err in finding
that its order was now the controlling order by 1997. And what about the fact
that the North Carolina order doesn’t mention duration at all? All this means,
the Court of Appeals explains, is that a North Carolina court did just what the
Virginia Court of Appeals now says it did. Its silence did not mean that it
automatically turned the New York order into one which complied (concerning
duration) with North Carolina law. Rather, this order was not really silent
because the 1997 NC order declared that all provisions of previous orders not
modified therein should remain in full force and effect. Therefore, the
Virginia trial court didn’t err in looking to the original
1994 NY order to determine how long support would last, and concluding that it
was to age 21.