Maryland Family Law Maryland family law opinions and commentary

The issue of a parent’s right, need or desire to relocate while sharing custody of children with another parent is becoming a more prevalent conversation in the courts. Whether a person has a need to get away from an abusive ...

A recent report by Maryland’s Department of Human Services showed a total of 179 youths in out-of-home placements throughout the state were admitted to emergency rooms for psychiatric evaluation or crisis between January 2020 and September 2021. Some of those ...

Video conferencing, such as Zoom, has made our courts and related services much more accessible to Maryland’s residents. While remote access to the courts, schools, and services, certainly has its disadvantages, it has also eased the significant burden of transportation, ...

In Child In Need of Assistance (“CINA”), proceedings children who have been removed from a parent’s custody are often in the care of relatives. They are either placed with a relative by the court directly, which grants temporary or permanent ...

Foster care youth are prescribed psychotropic medications at a rate 2.7 to 4.5 times higher than nonfoster children on Medicaid, according to a 2011 audit of five states conducted by the United States Government Accountability Office. In 2018, the Office ...

Throughout the United States, there are drug programs administered by the courts that provide monitoring of and substance abuse treatment to individuals who have been ordered to participate. These programs rely on random drug testing and frequent court hearings to ...

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 ...