Also, a judge in a second forum is absolutely prohibited from exercising jurisdiction when the case is pending elsewhere. The PKPA is quite explicit that custody cases cannot legitimately be pending in two states at once. The judge, when the case is already pending elsewhere, is required to communicate with his or her counterpart in the other state. However, the judicial communication is a wild card in this otherwise orderly business. Anything might happen, and it is a process usually not controlled or even witnessed by counsel.
Judges are often eager to send any custody case away to another court.
If the child has been gone from the first state for a long time, the judge will probably feel that the second state is where all the evidence is. The short answer is, all custody orders. When the state that made the determination does not fit somehow within the permissible PKPA categories, its prior determination can be ignored. It has been held that emergency jurisdiction confers authority only to make temporary orders and not to make a custody modification. Or the court of the other state may second-guess the first court as to whether an emergency actually existed.