Court Opinion

ID: 9765648
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:12:12.021368+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:54:08.426998
License: Public Domain

Morse, J.,
dissenting. This is an odd case. The child, Demetria, for whose benefit child support was provided by a New York court, has scant connections to Vermont.
While the magistrate concluded that Vermont was plaintiff’s residence because she resided here when the motion to modify was filed, the family court stated in its opinion:
This conclusion is clearly supported as it applies to the Magistrate’s determination of residency when the Petition to Modify was filed. However, under the Full Faith and Credit for Child Support Orders Act, 18 U.S.C. 1738B, analyzed by the Magistrate, Vermont would have had no jurisdiction to modify the New York order unless it could have been found at the time of the hearing that neither parent, nor the child, continued to be a New York resident. It is not clear from her order whether the Magistrate made such a finding, especially since she determined that, at the time of the hearing, Appellant was living in New York, had obtained a New York driver’s license, had registered her car there and had registered to vote there. Furthermore, the child was in New York attending college. A remand for a clarification of the findings would be warranted, except for the Court’s conclusion that, even assuming Vermont had jurisdiction to consider a petition to modify, no sufficient showing to justify modification has been made.
Even if we were to conclude that the family court was mistaken on the law,* this record hardly supports a conclusion that New York was “no longer . . . the child’s State or the residence of any individual contestant.” 28 U.S.C. § 1738B(e)(2)(A).
Plaintiff lived a rather nomadic life moving to a house to redecorate it and, once the job was finished, moving on to another. Plaintiff had moved from New York to Massachusetts, back to New York, then to Georgia, then to Vermont, and finally back to New York. Demetria *222apparently attended secondary school at Miss Porter’s in Connecticut before going to college in New York. Plaintiff testified she would live with her daughter’s godmother in New York if she was ever between houses. She always maintained a post office box in New York. The fact that plaintiff was served with a motion to modify while in Vermont in between states of residency is a mere fortuitous event, hardly a rationale for upsetting the expectation established many years before that Demetria would benefit from child support until age twenty-one.
I respectfully dissent.

 I wish to point out that the wholly intrastate application of Beaudry v. Beaudry, 132 Vt. 53, 312 A.2d 922 (1973), is distinguishable from this ease, and the holding there does not apply to a family temporarily situated in Vermont.