Law Commons^™

The Tragedy Of The Interstate Child: A Critical Reexamination Of The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act And The Parental Kidnaping Prevention Act, Anne B. Goldstein

Faculty Scholarship

This Article's thesis is that the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act (UCCJA) and the Parental Kidnaping Prevention Act (PKPA) have not eliminated jurisdictional competition because a federal system such as ours cannot achieve both of the Acts' two main instrumental goals - preventing or punishing "child snatching" and promoting well-informed decisions. Our system commits custody decisions to sovereign states, which make and modify the decisions according to indeterminate precepts. Such a system will inevitably create some version of the interstate child; so long as these features of our system persist, legislation cannot solve the problem. Therefore, although this Article proposes …