Court Opinion

ID: 9590003
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:50:52.129382+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:04:57.674135
License: Public Domain

OP ALA, Justice,
dissenting:
The narrow first-impression question before us is whether the district court should be prohibited from allowing a grandparent to intervene, in a post-decree stage of a divorce suit, to seek custody of the dissolved union’s minor offspring based on extremely serious allegations of parental misconduct and unfitness. The court’s pronouncement today bars the intervention and relegates the grandparent to the Children’s Code1 as affording exclusive avenue for redress. I am unable to join the court’s view.
Grandparents do indeed have standing, as relatives in the third degree, to litigate with the parents any controversy over the welfare of the minor issue. That right is given them by the terms of 10 O.S.1971 § 9.2 Within the framework of that statute grandparents may seek a district court order freeing their issue, wholly or partly, from the dominion of the parents and enforcing the duty of support. The fact that grandparents assert this right of redress not in an independent action but rather by a plea in intervention filed in the post-degree stages of a divorce action should be of no significance in a proceeding for a writ of prohibition. Prohibition will not lie for erroneous application of the law where the district court does clearly have jurisdiction of the subject-matter of the action and of the parties thereto. Spradling v. Hudson, 45 Okl. 767, 146 P. 588 [1915]; School Dist. No. 20 v. Walden, 146 Okl. 19, 293 P. 199, 203 [1930],
There are two other reasons why prohibition does not appear to be appropriate in this case. First, the grandparents have express statutory standing, in post-decree stages, to litigate with the divorced parents the issue of access to their offspring, including custodial visitation.3 Second, even if the Juvenile or Children’s Code did afford the grandparents exclusive remedy, the respondent-judge’s allowance of intervention or failure to order the matter transferred would constitute no more than erroneous assumption of authority for which prohibition cannot issue. Spradling v. Hudson, supra.
*651By our Constitution, Art. 7 § 7(a) the district court is a single, indivisible integrity with “unlimited original jurisdiction of all justiciable matters . . .”4 If we are to remain true of our fundamental .law’s mandate for an omnicompetent single-level trial court, we cannot regard ourselves free to chop up that tribunal into rigidly divided compartments by tightly restricting inter-divisional flow of cases. Prohibition operates here to inject mechanistic boundary lines between various permissible remedies. It returns us to the pre-1969 state of jurisdictional fragmentation by paralyzing the present system’s flexibility of internal case-flow management.
The juvenile division to which the grandparent here is incorrectly relegated is not a separate court but rather one of the statutory dockets of the district court. 20 O.S. 1971 § 91.2.' The district court itself is not without authority to hear the grandparent’s plea for custodial visitation or for full custody. More than one of its divisions may do so. I would hence deny the writ or refuse to assume original jurisdiction.
I am authorized to state that IRWIN, V. C. J., concurs in this view.

. 10 O.S.Supp. 1979 § 1101 et seq.

. The provisions of 10 O.S.1971 § 9 are:
“The abuse of parental authority is the subject of judicial cognizance in a civil action in the district court brought by the child, or by its relatives within the third degree, or by the officers of the poor where the child resides; and when the abuse is established, the child may be freed from the dominion of the parent, and the duty of support and education enforced.”

. The terms of 10 O.S.Supp.1978 § 5 provide in pertinent part:
“ * * * When both parents are deceased or if they are divorced, any grandparent, who is the parent of the child’s deceased or divorced parent, shall have reasonable rights of visitation to the child, when it is in the best interest of the child. The district courts are vested with jurisdiction to enforce such visitation rights and make orders relative thereto, upon the filing of a verified application for such visitation rights * * * ” [emphasis added]
“Reasonable visitation”, as a statutory term, is sufficiently broad to include custodial rights. English v. Macon, 46 Ala.App. 81, 238 So.2d 733, 739 [1970],

. In Tubby v. Tubby, 202 Cal. 272, 260 P. 294, 296 [1927], the court expressed itself in the following language concerning the jurisdictional integrity of the superior court:
“There is only one superior court in the city and county of San Francisco. * * * Jurisdiction is vested by the Constitution in the court, not in a particular judge or department. It further provides that there may be as many sessions of the court as there are judges. Whether sitting separately or together, the judges hold but one and the same court. The division into departments is for the convenient dispatch of business.” [emphasis added]
This expression aptly describes the jurisdictional sweep in the institutional design of our district court.