Maryland Family Law Maryland family law opinions and commentary

Families throughout Maryland continue to be adversely affected by the opioid epidemic. The entry of children into foster care is a significant consequence of this epidemic. For example, a five year old child finds both her parents, who have opioid ...

Foster parents are to be commended for the commitment that they make to care for abused and neglected children in their community. Foster parents provide placements for children from infancy to late teens, who come to the foster care system ...

How and whether siblings placed separately in foster care will be given opportunities to visit one another regularly and maintain familial connections are questions sometimes overlooked by the local Department of Social Services (“Department”) in its exercise of its primary ...

When La’Chell was 4 years old, she had been living with her Aunt off and on for most of her life, as her mother rarely had stable housing. When Aunt wanted to enroll her niece into Head Start, a consent ...

Adverse Childhood Experiences (“ACEs”) refers to maltreatment and other family problems which, when identified for an individual, create risk factors for negative social, emotional, behavioral, and health outcomes for an individual. From 1995 to 1997, Kaiser Permanente conducted the original ...

Adoption in Maryland, as in the rest of the United States, originated by statute and is dependent upon local statutory provisions. It does not derive from common law. In more than 40 jurisdictions in the United States, including Maryland, however, ...

On Nov. 9, 2021, Maryland’s Appellate Court issued an order rescinding the existing court rules and adopting new rules for the juvenile court, found in Title 11 of the Maryland Rules, effective Jan. 1, 2022.  Many of the changes are ...

In the 2016 case, Conover v. Conover, Maryland’s Court of Appeals recognized the rights of “de facto parents.” Conover v. Conover, 450 Md. 51, 146 A.3d 433 (2016). De facto parents are individuals who have a parent-like relationship with a ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly reduced the number of public adoptions, those involving children in foster care, or Children In Need of Assistance. In November 2019, Maryland recorded 49 adoptions of foster care children. This number decreased to 9 adoptions ...

In recent months, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Baltimore has been shocked by the murders of two sets of siblings at the hands of their caregivers. In July of 2021, an officer conducting a routine traffic stop, found ...