Cavallari v. Martin

• Decision Date: 07 May 1999
• Docket Number: No. 97-278.,97-278.
• Citation: 732 A.2d 739
• Parties: Marilyn CAVALLARI v. Kingsley MARTIN.
• Court: Vermont Supreme Court

732 A.2d 739

Marilyn CAVALLARI v. Kingsley MARTIN.

No. 97-278.

Supreme Court of Vermont.

May 7, 1999.

Marilyn Cavallari, Pro Se, Cambridge, New York, Plaintiff-Appellee.

Adele V. Pastor of Corsones & Corsones, Rutland, for Defendant-Appellant.

Present AMESTOY, C.J., and DOOLEY, MORSE, JOHNSON and SKOGLUND, JJ.

DOOLEY, J.

The simple question raised by this case requires the Court to confront the legal jigsaw puzzle of state and federal statutes applicable to the interstate enforcement of child support orders. At issue is a decree, originally entered by a New York court pursuant to that state's law, allocating parental rights and responsibilities between a father and a mother who each subsequently moved to Vermont. Although the decree is silent on the issue, New York law requires the noncustodial parent to pay child support until the child's twenty-first birthday. We must decide whether our family court was required to apply Vermont law and therefore to modify the decree to terminate the support obligation when the child turned eighteen. We hold that it was, and therefore reverse the judgment of the family court, but stress that subsequent statutory amendments would yield a different result in a modification request first presented to the family court today. The relevant facts are not in dispute.¹ The parties never married but had one child, born in 1978 when they were residents of New York. In the same year, a New York court entered an order establishing a child support obligation for father as the noncustodial parent. The order does not specify the duration of the support obligation. Shortly after the order issued, mother and child moved to Pennsylvania. In 1990, a New York court modified the order to increase father's payments. At that time, father still resided in New York. Several years later, however, he moved to Vermont. The child turned eighteen on January 22, 1996 and graduated from high school on June 6, 1996. On June 12, 1996, father petitioned the Bennington Family Court to modify the 1990 New York order.² He alleged that mother and child were then also residing in Vermont and, therefore, that the court should apply Vermont law to determine that his duty to support his minor child had ended because by then she had turned eighteen and had graduated from high school. See 15 V.S.A. § 658(c) (providing that court "may order support to be continued until the child attains the age of majority or terminates secondary education whichever is later"); 1 V.S.A. § 173 (fixing age of majority at eighteen). Father contended that, although New York law obligated him to support his child until she was twenty-one, Vermont's earlier age of majority applied.

After a hearing, a family court magistrate found that mother and child were residents of Vermont at the time father's motion was filed and at the time of the hearing. The magistrate concluded that Vermont law applied because the forum state "need not accede to the judgment of a sister state concerning a continuing matter that has become a purely internal affair." Accordingly, the magistrate terminated father's support obligation. Mother appealed to the family court.

The family court adopted the magistrate's factual determinations but reached the opposite result. The court reasoned that a "real, substantial and unanticipated change of circumstances," as required for modification of a support obligation pursuant to 15 V.S.A. § 660(a), is not established simply because a new jurisdiction with a different law governing duration of child support orders has acquired personal jurisdiction over the parties to the decree. Thus, although the family court agreed that the parties were subject to the laws of Vermont generally, the court determined that it was without authority to modify the support obligation because father failed to meet the specific jurisdictional prerequisite.³ Father appeals.

The family court's rationale, while having the virtue of avoiding a difficult choice-of-law problem, is inconsistent with applicable precedent. In Beaudry v. Beaudry, 132 Vt. 53, 312 A.2d 922 (1973), a case that arose soon after the Legislature lowered the age of majority from twenty-one to eighteen, this Court considered the validity of a child support order that modified a 1959 decree requiring the father of three children to pay child support of $35 per week during the minority of the children. The new superior court order, entered in light of the lowered age of majority, limited father's obligation to the period before the eighteenth birthday of the children. Wife argued on appeal that the order could not be modified solely because the age of majority had changed. We rejected this argument:

In this state a divorce decree for alimony or other annual allowance for the wife or children is not a final judgment. After the entry of the original decree, the Court has the power under 15 V.S.A. § 292 to make, modify or revise its orders concerning the custody and support of minor children. Circumstantial changes in the situation of either party, affecting either the necessity and amount of support or the ability, improved or handicapped to provide it, may be properly brought to the attention of the court by a petition to modify at any time during the minority of the children. Judgments as to the support and maintenance of minor children are necessarily provisional and temporary; in no sense are they a final adjudication of the rights and duties of parent and child. No rights, therefore, vested by virtue of the 1959 order and no rights were divested by virtue of the 1973 order.

The status of the Beaudry children is defined not by the decretal order of 1959, but by the terms of 1 V.S.A. § 173. They will attain their majority at the age of eighteen, and the court is without proper power to order provision for their support, including education, beyond that age.

Id. at 57-58, 312 A.2d at 925 (citations omitted); see also Forte v. Forte, 143 Vt. 518, 520-21, 468 A.2d 561, 562 (1983) (error to enforce pre-1971 support order beyond new age of majority).⁴

The ground for modification in this case is exactly the same as that present in Beaudry—a new age of majority is effective, and the court must apply this age to the pre-existing support order. Indeed, as Beaudry holds, the family court has no jurisdiction to enforce a child support order against plaintiff beyond the eighteenth birthday of the child or the child's graduation from secondary school. Since Vermont law requires the result requested by father, we are forced to confront the issue avoided by the family court and decide whether the choice-of-law principles set forth in the applicable statutes governing interstate enforcement of support obligations requires that New York law govern this case.

We begin our choice-of-law inquiry by noting that, as far as we can determine, every court that has faced the situation before us has modified the preexisting support order to reflect the duration-of-support rule of the forum state, the new state of residency of the parties. See Finney v. Eagly, 568 So.2d 816, 819 (Ala.Ct.App. 1990); Elkins v. James, 40 Ark.App. 44, 842 S.W.2d 58, 62 (1992); In re Marriage of McCabe, 819 P.2d 1116, 1120 (Colo.Ct. App.1991); Hodges v. Hodges, 415 N.W.2d 62, 68 (Minn.Ct.App.1987); Lewis v. Roskin, 895 S.W.2d 190, 197 (Mo.Ct.App.1995). In some cases, the modification extends the duration to twenty-two years, the rule in the forum state. See Lewis, 895 S.W.2d at 197. In others, it reduces the duration to eighteen years, the rule in the forum state. See Elkins, 842 S.W.2d at 62.

To reinforce the availability of modification when the parties move to a state with a different durational rule, the New York courts have held that a foreign support order that terminates on the eighteenth birthday of the child must be modified to reflect New York's twenty-one year duration when the parties move to New York. See Ryan v. Ryan, 128 A.D.2d 624, 513 N.Y.S.2d 25, 25-26 (1987). Thus, if the situation had been reversed, and parties governed by a Vermont support order moved to New York, the New York courts would have routinely modified that order so that it continued until the child reached twenty-one years of age. It would be incongruous to hold that Vermont courts may not take equivalent action.

We are aware, of course, that Article IV, § 1 of the United States Constitution requires the courts of each state to accord full faith and credit to judicial proceedings of other states. We also acknowledge that, in appropriate circumstances, principles of comity can provide an additional basis for nonintervention by a Vermont court in a dispute that has already come before some other forum. The case law from other jurisdictions, however, illustrates why neither comity nor constitutional principles of full faith and credit required the family court to stay its hand here. As the California Supreme Court has stressed, after reviewing the applicable full-faith-and-credit jurisprudence, "the federal system now espouses the principle that no state may freeze the obligations flowing from the continuing relationship of parent and child." Elkind v. Byck, 68 Cal.2d 453, 67 Cal.Rptr. 404, 439 P.2d 316, 320 (1968). When the parties, including the child, all move to this state, Vermont's courts are responsible for the welfare of the child, and New York no longer has a legitimate interest in the relationship. See Thompson v. Thompson, 645 S.W.2d 79, 88 (Mo.Ct.App.1982). The duration of child support "become[s] an internal affair of this state." Elkins, 842 S.W.2d at 62. We must honor the Vermont Legislature's decision that a child support obligation may not continue beyond the eighteenth birthday of the child or the child's graduation from secondary school.

The next question we confront is whether the Legislature has in any sense qualified that choice by virtue of the statutes it has enacted in the area of interstate enforcement of...