All over the country, we are creating systems of family law reform named after children who have died. Caden’s Law in Pennsylvania. Kaira’s Law in New York. California Piki’s Law. Grayson’s Law in Florida. Utah’s Om’s Law. Alec and Lydia Law of Arizona; Each exists because a mother tried to alert the system before her children were killed by their father.

Federal and state laws essentially ignore children because they do not enjoy a right to safety in this country. Although parents have a fundamental right under federal law and state constitutions to oversee the “custody, custody, and control” of their children, neither the federal constitution nor most state constitutional frameworks recognize a corresponding affirmative right to the safety of children during custody proceedings. And because the United States is the only United Nations member state that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children in the United States lack basic human rights, including adequate legal protection and safeguards.

It’s no wonder, then, that children continue to die at the hands of their parents during custody battles. State law primarily considers children to be property and divides them 50/50, similar to how the equity in a marital home is divided. Judges routinely ignore mothers’ cries for help and objections to joint custody.

Tragedies resulting from court-ordered joint custody are not unforeseen. In more than 20 years of representing victims of domestic violence in family court, I have seen women enter court with police reports, medical records, credible threats, witness reports, psychiatric histories, photos, and text messages. Time and time again, they are treated as disabled persons in “co-parenting” rather than as reliable witnesses to danger.

The justice system often treats these murders as shocking, unpredictable anomalies, because recognizing foreseeability also requires acknowledging systemic failures. It is easier to say that the father’s violence came “out of nowhere” than to admit that the mother’s warnings could have changed the outcome.

In Arizona, Hope Hooton took just 15 minutes to argue before a judge finally granted her estranged husband unsupervised parenting time, despite documented mental health concerns and prior threats. In 2024, during court-ordered parenting time, Brock Meter murdered his children, 7-year-old Alec and 6-year-old Lydia, and then committed suicide.

Currently, Mr. Hooton is advocating the Alec Lydia method. The law would require judges to make written findings about patterns of domestic violence and give greater weight to police reports and medical records in detention decisions. This bill seeks to return the focus of family courts to their original jurisdiction of child safety.

Arizona is not unique in this regard.

Every time a child is murdered by the father during or after a custody battle, the grieving mother is forced to become a legislative advocate at some point. Each time, lawmakers draft another bill bearing the child’s name. Each time, we promise to learn from tragedy. And each time, the same organizational culture remains largely intact.

Family courts across the country routinely neglect co-parenting arrangements, even in cases involving coercive control, physical violence, suicidal or homicidal thoughts, or access to firearms. While judges are encouraged to preserve parent-child relationships at almost all costs, allegations of abuse are too often reframed as attempts to gain strategic advantage in custody cases. In my personal experience, mothers who express fear are sometimes assumed to be lying. In fact, mothers who allege abuse have a 70 percent chance of losing custody, even if the threats are later found to be genuine.

At the root of these decisions is a desire: the judge want Fathers are expected to be equal parents, and the fathers’ rights movement is lobbying hard to convince them that 50-50 custody should be the default. It is also much easier for a judge to enter a default judgment than to hold a trial. Across the country, judges are encouraging mothers (like Hooten) to settle for equal joint custody of even infants and toddlers, an arrangement that is the exact opposite of what child psychologists recommend.

But the warning signs of a dangerous father are painfully common. It’s a history of domestic violence. An obsession with control, be it physical, emotional, or financial. Threats of self-harm. Female murder and death threats. Increased instability. And finally, access to firearms. These are not details discovered later by chance. These are well-established risk factors for lethal violence. The problem is not that there are no warning signs. The problem is that we repeatedly fail to act on them.

This failure is structural. Although family law is one of the most important jobs in the legal system, it is often referred to as a “temporary court” because within the judicial system it is treated as a passing field rather than a specialty that judges aspire to. The job is emotionally demanding, politically unrewarding, and rarely prestigious. The judges assigned there had little experience in family law, and the judge in Alec and Lydia’s case was a former state attorney general. They have no specialized training in domestic violence, coercive control, trauma, child psychology, or lethal assessment. This is true even though women and children are responsible for deciding whether to live or die.

We will never appoint untrained judges to oversee complex patent litigation or multibillion-dollar securities disputes and dismiss fatal mistakes as inevitable. Yet we routinely ask judges with minimal specialized training to make swift decisions that risk the lives and deaths of women and children.

What is needed is not just another law named after another deceased child, but many of those laws would be helpful. One important aspect of the Alec Lydia Act, which is still pending, is that judges are required to issue written findings when safety concerns are raised. What we need is a professionally staffed custody court. only It is by a judge who has received extensive training in domestic violence and child safety. And we need to reduce the size of the docket so that well-meaning judges can actually hear these cases.

But more importantly, we must change the mindset that children are property to be divided. It is time to give children a fundamental right to safety, based on state human rights laws and constitutions modeled on United Nations conventions. The language, rights, and policy priorities contained in state constitutions reflect the cultural values ​​that state residents uphold and seek to protect. They indicate what a society considers important and legitimate. Over time, public attitudes can be shaped by legitimizing certain principles and incorporating them into the state’s legal and political framework. Therefore, enshrining the humanity of children in state constitutions is an important first step toward treating children as full human beings. A society that recognizes the humanity of children is less likely to overlook documented patterns of abuse and more likely to minimize threats to child safety as interpersonal and unpleasant “conflicts” between two equally situated parents.

We must also face the truth that our legal system continues to resist. Women who report abuse are often right. The mothers who enacted these laws were not irrational or conspiratorial. They weren’t trying to interfere with co-parenting. They were trying to keep their children alive.

Kayden. Kira. Piki. Grayson. ah. Alec and Lydia.

This list of horrific new legal traditions, named after the failure of family courts to protect children in the Parental Rights Reform Act, will continue to grow until the system changes.

Dale Margolin Cecka is an associate professor and director of the Domestic Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School.

Recommended citation: Dale Margolin Cecka, State constitutions need to better protect childrenSᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (June 22, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/state-constitutions-must-better-protect-children

Sixteen years ago, Florida voters sent a clear message to political leaders, overwhelmingly voting in favor of an amendment to the state constitution that would limit politicians’ ability to gerrymander districts. But a Florida trial court last month refused to grant a preliminary injunction against Congressional maps drawn as part of President Donald Trump’s partisan push for mid-decade redistricting to undermine the will of voters. Last week, the Florida Superior Court denied the plaintiffs’ emergency motion to block the use of the map while the lawsuit continues. This means the new map, which aims to increase Republicans’ seats by up to four seats, will remain in place in the midterm elections.

In 2010, after four years of work by a nonpartisan citizen group organized under the name FairDistrictsFlorida.org, Floridians voted for a constitutional amendment that created strict rules for drawing legislative and congressional districts. In other words, electoral districts could not be drawn with the intention of favoring incumbents or political parties. We cannot reduce the voting power of minorities. Districts were to be compact, evenly populated, and to follow recognizable local boundaries.

These requirements were included in two citizen initiatives known as the Fair Districts Amendment, which passed with 63 percent of the vote.

Drafting the amendment in a way that maximizes its chances of passage and maintains the legal effect of eliminating gerrymandering was not easy. I knew that because I was the campaign chair for FairDistrictsFlorida.org. Before finalizing the content and language of the amendment, a bipartisan drafting committee consulted with a broad and diverse group of election experts and opinion leaders and incorporated their recommendations. For example, community leaders expressed concern that if the amendment passed, it would reduce the voting power of racial minorities. Language was created to address that concern. Care was taken to ensure that the wording on the ballot paper was clear and easy to understand.

Under Florida law, the Florida Supreme Court was required to review the proposed amendment to determine whether it addressed multiple subjects or was vague or misleading. The court passed the ballot amendment. To put the initiative on the ballot, signatures from more than 1.6 million Florida voters supporting the amendment were collected and verified by election officials.

As campaign leaders, we knew it was important that this effort be bipartisan and that we pay significant attention to coalition development. Our board of directors, which provided strategic guidance, was comprised of Republicans and Democrats. We were in constant contact with our supporters and the media. The message was consistent and disciplined. As a result, the amendment received frequent and positive media coverage. All major newspapers in the state published multiple editorials supporting the measure.

But from the beginning, these efforts encountered fierce opposition from lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., other elected officials, and professional partisans.

Politicians opposed to the amendment employed several strategies to prevent its passage, but were unsuccessful. They attempted to personally blackmail the movement’s leaders. Congress voted to put the “poison pill” amendment on the ballot. If this amendment passes, the new standard would become invalid. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature’s amendment was intentionally misleading and removed it from the ballot. Opponents of the ballot measure unsuccessfully sued in court to remove the amendment from the ballot. In the end, they spent $4.3 million on an unsuccessful media campaign to stop the amendment from passing.

Voters approved the amendment on Election Day, and litigation to invalidate the amendment began almost immediately. At 2:30 a.m., just hours after the amendment was passed, the Florida House of Representatives and two members of Congress filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the amendment from taking effect. This was the first of several lawsuits over six years. A coalition of groups supporting the amendment fought and won each case, defeating four federal challenges and securing eight favorable decisions from the Florida Supreme Court.

After the 2010 census, the Fair District Florida Coalition challenged the maps drawn by Congress in 2012. The state court judge in charge of the challenge found that state legislative leaders “colluded” with Republican operatives to “manipulate and influence the redistricting process” by secretly developing a plan to thwart public opinion and pass a congressional map that “mocks” the language of the new constitution. The state Supreme Court agreed and ordered the map to be redrawn according to the principles enshrined in the Fair Districts Amendment. These court-ordered maps were put in place for the 2016 election. The result was an immediate shift toward fairness and balance in partisan representation in Congress and the Florida Senate.

When Congress redistricted after the 2020 Census, it sought to follow constitutional restrictions imposed by Floridians. This didn’t sit well with some of Tallahassee’s political establishment, including Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). As lawmakers passed a compliant legislative map, the governor tweeted that it was “DOA” (dead on arrival) and vowed to veto it.

The governor instead insisted that the Legislature pass a staff-drafted map that eliminated the only district in North Florida that has consistently elected black legislators, a clear violation of the amendment’s ban on diminishing the ability of minorities to elect members of their own choice. Nevertheless, the governor’s map was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court, which recently moved sharply to the right with the appointment of five new justices by DeSantis.

Then, in the summer of 2025, President Trump directed red states to redraw their congressional boundaries to create additional Republican districts for the 2026 midterm elections. Mr. DeSantis almost immediately announced that he expected the Florida Legislature to comply with that directive, and announced that he would convene a special legislative session at the end of April 2026 for that purpose. The timing was such that it would almost certainly be impossible to complete a court challenge to the new map before the June nomination deadline.

Once the special session began, it became clear that Congress had nothing to do with drawing the map. The governor had ordered his staff to draw maps that ignored the Fair Districts Amendment’s constitutional limits on partisan favoritism and protections for racial and linguistic minority voters. The governor provided the map to lawmakers 24 hours before the session began. As a result, the map added four likely Republican seats and redrawn the state’s only remaining majority-black congressional district, significantly reducing the share of black voters.

Sixty-three percent of Floridians voted in favor of the Fair Districts Amendment to prevent exactly what just happened: the passage of gerrymandered maps that favor the dominant party and weaken black political power. The majority of Floridians want fairly drawn districts, as required by the Florida Constitution. However, for political reasons, the governor decided to ignore the will of the people and ignore the Constitution, and insisted that the Legislature take similar action.

This should be a wake-up call to all Floridians about how much the state’s government has deteriorated since 2010. Rather than covertly ignoring constitutional obligations as they did in 2012, this year the governor and Legislature publicly announced that they were ignoring constitutional obligations. And unlike the cases that followed the passage of the Fair Districts Amendment, today’s Florida courts appear unwilling to stand up to partisan forces. Where are the checks and balances? What constitutional protections will our government ignore next?

Ellen Freidin was the campaign chair for FairDistrictsFlorida.org.

Recommended citation: Ellen Freidin Florida courts and politicians ignored the people’s messageSᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (June 18, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/florida-courts-and-politicians-ignored-peoples-message