Court Opinion

ID: 9700894
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 21:52:37.153056+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:15.789188
License: Public Domain

HARRIS, Associate Judge,
dissenting:
If the trial court had jurisdiction over the proceeding which was before it, I would share my colleagues’ belief that its action should be affirmed as being neither plainly wrong nor without evidence to support it. See D.C.Code 1973, § 17-305(a). However, I agree with appellant-mother that jurisdiction over the subject matter was barred by statute. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
A brief digression is necessary to comment upon terminology. For years, Sub-chapter II of Chapter 23 of Title 16 of the District of Columbia Code (like its predecessor statutes when jurisdiction over such matters was vested in the former Juvenile Court) was captioned “Paternity Proceedings.” Similarly, § 16-2342 of the Code dealt with proceedings “to establish paternity and provide for the support of a child born out of wedlock . . . .” This, of course, was both logical and typical of comparable statutory provisions elsewhere. Biologically, men father babies; women have them. It would be an extraordinary case (e. g., an infant abandoned on a hospital’s steps) in which the identity of a child’s mother is unknown; it is regrettably far from uncommon for the identity of a child’s father to be uncertain.
The City Council enacted an Anti-Sex Discriminatory Language Act (D.C.Law No. 1-87) which became effective October 1, 1976. In part, it changed the caption of Subchapter II from “Paternity Proceedings” to “Parentage Proceedings,” and changed the nomenclature of proceedings covered by the limitation period of § lb-2342 from ones “to establish paternity” to ones “to establish parentage.” No comparable change was made (nor could it have been) in D.C.Code 1973, § 11-1101(11). It provides that the Family Division of the Superior Court has exclusive jurisdiction over “proceedings to determine paternity of any child born out of wedlock.”1
*247The pleading which initiated this proceeding in the trial court was entitled “Petition To Determine Paternity and Enforce Visitation Rights.” The jurisdictional basis for the action specifically was stated to be § 11-1101 of the Code. D.C.Code 1977 Supp., § 16-2342, which is captioned “Time of bringing complaint,” now provides in pertinent part that:
Proceedings over which the [Family] Division has jurisdiction under paragraphs (3) and (11) of section 11-1101 to establish parentage and provide for the support of a child born out of wedlock may be instituted after four months of pregnancy or within two years after the birth of the child .
That particular statute of limitation apparently was not specifically called to the attention of the able trial judge, who, after a hearing, found appellee to be the father of the child and provided for visitation rights.2
In this case, as is so often true, the birth of an illegitimate child has lingering traumatic effects upon both its mother and its father. There is room for sympathy for both parents: for the father, who after years of inattention now desires to establish a parental relationship with his young son, and for the mother, who after having raised her baby through the first three years of his life has restructured her life (including marriage to another man) and is anxious that it not be disrupted. The mother also fears that the belated and unanticipated intrusion of the father into the child’s narrow world would be detrimental to the child’s interests.
This case obviously is unusual. Here we do not have a mother seeking a judicial determination of the identity of her child’s father, but rather a father seeking such a ruling. Unquestionably the principal purpose of the statutes permitting the bringing of a paternity action is to protect a mother and her child (and, collaterally, the state, upon which the burden of support so often falls), enabling the mother to establish the identity of the father and to establish a duty of support. However, as to the statute which provides a time limitation for the bringing of such an action, other factors are relevant. Memories of the parties and other possible witnesses inevitably dim. More importantly, assuming that the parents stay apart, each will go on to make for himself or herself a new life — lives which, at some point, should be free of the spectre of a possible paternity action. These reasons underlay the legislative adoption of a two-year statute of limitation for the initiation of an action to establish “parentage” (the term used in the amended § 16-2342 of the Code) or “paternity” [the term used in § 11-1101(11)].
The father, like the mother, readily could have begun an action for a judicial determination of paternity within two years after the baby’s birth. He did not; he voluntarily permitted more than three years to pass. He thus ran inescapably afoul of § 16-2342’s two-year limitation period. In my view, the trial court accordingly lacked jurisdiction over the subject matter and the “Petition To Determine Paternity and Enforce Visitation Rights” should have been dismissed.
The majority sees the case differently. It concludes that § 16-2342 “is not applicable to the type of proceeding with which we deal here.” The reason given: “The jurisdiction of the trial court stemmed from the general equitable powers of the Superior Court, see D.C.Code 1973, § ll-921(a), rather than from § 11 — 1101. Appellee sued to establish the right to visitation, in essence an equitable domestic relations action, such as an action for custody or divorce.”
I invite any interested reader to make a cursory comparison between § 11 — 921(a) of *248the Code (which was enacted essentially to prescribe the timetable for transition to the enlarged jurisdiction of the Superior Court pursuant to the Court Reform Act of 1970) and § 11-1101(11). The former is irrelevant; the latter — specifically relied upon by the father in his petition — expressly confers jurisdiction on the Family Division of the Superior Court in “proceedings to determine paternity of any child born out of wedlock.”
The granting of visitation rights in an appropriate case may or may not be “equitable” in nature, as contended by the majority, but that is beside the point. Our appellee is not entitled to, and could not be awarded, visitation rights without a prior determination of his paternity. That is why he sought and obtained the trial court’s ruling that he is the father. I do not see how it can be seriously questioned that an effort by a particular man to be declared the father of a particular child constitutes seeking a remedy at law, and that the unequivocal limitation period of § 16 — 2342 is applicable thereto (unless, of course, the statute of limitation is waived by the defending parent, which did not happen here).3
The majority effectively writes § 16-2342 out of the Code for a father who seeks, at any time, to establish his paternity. Presumably the majority would continue to recognize its validity for a mother who wishes to establish the paternity of her child, as the mother virtually invariably would have custody of the child. In my view, the judicial sleight of hand by which the majority relieves fathers from compliance with the statutory limitation period (i. e., the underlying paternity determination disappears, leaving only the visitation question in view) raises a serious equal protection question to which I now merely allude but upon which I shall not now elaborate.4
Thus, I am convinced that the remedy which appellee sought pursuant to § 11-1101(11) was required by § 16-2342 to have been commenced within two years of the baby’s birth. His waiting for more than three years before filing his petition should preclude his receiving the relief sanctioned by the majority. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

. Subsection 11 of § 11-1101 is distinct from subsection 3 thereof, which relates solely to “actions to enforce support of any person as required by law.”
It should be noted that the City Council does not have the authority to effect any change in Title 11 of the District of Columbia Code, which relates to the organization and jurisdiction of the District of Columbia courts. See D.C.Code 1977 Supp., § l-147(a)(4).

. There was, however, no waiver of the statute of limitation; the mother’s opposition to the -“Petition To Determine Paternity and Enforce Visitation Rights” stated in part that “petitioner is guilty of laches and also barred by the Statute of Limitations which is being pleaded herein as an affirmative defense.”

. It will be recalled that § 16-2342 refers to actions “to establish parentage and provide for the support of a child bom out of wedlock.” In Harrison v. District of Columbia, D.C.Mun. App., 95 A.2d 332 (1953), our predecessor court concluded that there then was no authority for the former Juvenile Court “to entertain a proceeding merely to determine the paternity of an illegitimate child.” Id., at 333. Thus, it formerly was necessary for a request for support to accompany a petition to determine paternity. However, § 11-1101(11) of the Code (enacted in 1970) provides for a paternity action without reference to support. Nonetheless, to be safe, our appellee stated in his petition that he was “ready, willing, and able to contribute to the financial support of the minor child herein.”

. The majority purports to find a spectre of an equal protection issue to support its position, briefly discussing visitation problems between married parents who are living apart. Such a position has no merit, for in such situations there is no question as to paternity and hence no statute of limitation. Here, paternity was the crux of the case.