Hammond Legal Blog

If you've heard of a domestic partnership, you may know that it means that a couple is living together, but beyond that aren't sure what legal protections it entails. A domestic partnership is a relationship between two people living together. They are not married, but they do obtain rights such as survivorship, hospital visitation and more.

Domestic partnerships were first created in the 1980s as a response to the difficulty same-sex couples had when trying to marry. Domestic partnerships aren't needed as often today thanks to the legalization of same-sex marriage, but some people do still choose them over marriage.

One of the things that parents sometimes run into with child custody orders is an ex-spouse who interferes with the orders. For example, one parent may regularly say that he or she is sick or that the kids are sick, so they don't have to drop them off on time. Another example would be refusing to send a child home or refusing the child's requests to call the other parent if the court order and parenting arrangement allowed it.

Police and sheriffs respond to domestic complaints many times each year, but people can do better and save these emergency workers time and energy. While separations and divorces are hard, a court order is there to make sure you do what you're meant to do. If you aren't, then you're interfering with custody and could end up back in court. Parents who regularly interfere with custody for no good reason may lose custody or go from a custodial to noncustodial parent.

There are several ways that you can set up custody and visitation to benefit you and your child in Louisiana. First, you need to know some terms. First, the domiciliary parent is the one who has a home where the child lives. The other parent is the parent with visitation. Physical custody refers to the person who has physical custody of a child during a certain time. Normally, both parents have physical custody at one point or another, but there is one parent who has domicile in most cases.

There are three kinds of schedules to have in place. One is a residential schedule, another is the holiday schedule and a third is the summer break schedule. These schedules are important, because they determine where your child will be during those time periods.

As a parent who would like to seek sole custody, it's a good idea to understand exactly what that means. Sole custody means that you'll have the exclusive physical and legal custody of your child. You will not have to ask the other parent for permission to allow your child to do certain things, but the other parent will need to ask you if he or she intends to travel with the child or seek medical attention for him or her, for example.

In many cases, parents share legal custody while one parent has sole physical custody. That means that both parents have a right to make decisions in the best interests of the child but only one has primary custody while the other may or may not have visitation rights.