Family Court Reforms Map

Where these layers come from

Copy link to this section https://mybmd.org/fyi/family-court-reforms/#garza-stack

Robert Garza, a Texas family court reform advocate, publishes a numbered set of model bills that several state campaigns refer to. The names below are quoted from his own FAQ - that page is authoritative for what is IN the stack, and is not evidence that any state has enacted any of it.

Advocacy source. Advocacy source. Every legal status on this map is sourced separately to a legislature or a statute, never to this page. One caution for anyone checking these claims: Texas bill numbers repeat between sessions. SB 718 of the 88th Regular Session (2023) is the "Time Taken, Time Back" possession-make-up bill and was signed into law; SB 718 of the 89th Regular Session (2025) is an unrelated groundwater fund bill. Checking the wrong session makes a true claim look false.

Who has custody before anyone goes to court

Copy link to this section https://mybmd.org/fyi/family-court-reforms/#custody-at-birth

Before anyone goes to court, who has custody of a child born to unmarried parents? This is a different question from the equal parenting time presumption above, which only operates once a case has been filed.

This survey is incomplete. A state is classified only when its own statute has been read and is cited below. Everything else is marked "Not yet reviewed" - which is NOT a finding that the state has no default rule. Secondary summaries of these statutes proved unreliable during this survey, including one that attributed a Texas-only term to Maryland, so no state is classified from a summary. This survey is incomplete and says so. Reviewing the remaining states means reading each one's code, and several states' codes are not published at a stable public URL that can be cited here.

Counts for this survey are in the map legend above - pick the "Custody at birth, unmarried parents" layer.

Both parents by statute (2)

Mother by default until a court orders otherwise (5)

Clare Huntington, Family Law and Nonmarital Families, 53 Fam. Ct. Rev. 233 (2015), found that most states have no default rule allocating custody at birth and that fifteen gave the unmarried mother sole custody. That count is from 2015 and is treated here as a lead to re-verify, not as data. (paper)

Bar association positions, and who controlled the legislature

Copy link to this section https://mybmd.org/fyi/family-court-reforms/#bar-positions

Where a state bar association took a position on one of these bills, and how the bill then fared. Listed only where an official registry, hearing record or named report documents the position - a bar that simply has not been recorded is shown as "No position found", which is not the same as neutral.

Read this before the table. Two documented cases cannot show a tendency, and both of them sit in states whose legislature was Republican-controlled, so party does not separate the outcomes here. This is a list of what is on the record, not a finding about cause.

Legislative control and governor are from the National Conference of State Legislatures partisan composition table dated 2025-08-29, except Arkansas, whose 2021 session is cited separately. Control shown for a state whose bill is older is the CURRENT composition and is not a claim about the composition when that bill was voted on.

Arkansas: The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced SB 18 over the objections of the state judges and the Arkansas Bar Association. A Bar Association representative and a member of the Judicial Council both spoke against it at the committee hearing, arguing the clear-and-convincing standard set too high a bar.

Wisconsin: The State Bar of Wisconsin registered an Oppose position on SB 161 in the state lobbying registry, with the comment that the Family Law Section of the State Bar opposes the legislation.

Pennsylvania: No position by the Pennsylvania Bar Association on HB 1499 was found. The PBA Family Law Section did testify against an earlier 50/50 custody bill, HB 1397, in 2020; that is a different bill and is recorded here as context, not as a position on HB 1499.

Wisconsin, in detail

Registered positions on AB 151 / SB 161 (2025-2026 session), from the state lobbying registry (source):

• Oppose State Bar of Wisconsin
• Oppose End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin
• Oppose National Association of Social Workers - Wisconsin Chapter
• Oppose Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault
• Other Legal Action of Wisconsin
• Support Bartholomew F. Reuter

No legislator is recorded as voting against these bills, because no vote was ever taken: SB 161 had a public hearing on 2025-10-08 and no executive session or floor vote at any stage, then failed at the end of the session. Treating a legislator as opposed because a bill was not scheduled would be inferring a position from silence, so no such inference is made here.

Sponsors (source):

• Senator Eric Wimberger - Author (SB 161). Occupation per official biography: Attorney; opened a law practice in Green Bay, Marquette University Law School (source)
• Representative Mursau - Author (AB 151)
• Representatives Armstrong, Behnke, Brooks, Dallman, Knodl, Kreibich, O'Connor, Piwowarczyk, Steffen - Cosponsors

Occupation is recorded from the official legislature-hosted biography and is listed because it is a matter of public record. BMD does not assert why any person or organization took the position it took. Note that the only Wisconsin legislator on record here is the bill's author, and he is a lawyer - the lawyer whose bill the State Bar opposed.

The federal layer

Copy link to this section https://mybmd.org/fyi/family-court-reforms/#federal

Family law is state law, but Washington shapes it with money. Two federal levers reach into every state system on this map.

What this does not claim. What this section does NOT claim: no federal bill authored, sponsored or testified on by Mark Ludwig was found. His verifiable legislative record is state-level. His federal work is a policy critique of the Title IV-D incentive structure, which is recorded below as his position, separately from what federal law does. H.R. 650 is cited by others in this context; congress.gov blocked automated retrieval, so it is not described here.

An advocate position, labelled as one

Mark Ludwig, Americans for Equal Shared Parenting: He argues the IV-D program drifted from its original purpose, that 1990s changes drew most child support orders into it, and that the performance incentive pool gives states a financial reason to expand enforcement.

Advocacy position, not a finding. Presented here because it is the federal argument behind several state layers; BMD has not verified the causal claim. (source)

How this interacts with the state layers

The state layers and the federal levers are different machinery. A shared parenting presumption changes what a judge starts from in a filed case. A custody-at-birth rule changes who has the child before anyone files. The IV-D incentive pool and the quadrennial review change what a state is paid for and when it must revisit its formula. A reform can succeed at one level and be unaffected at another, which is why they are shown as separate layers rather than one score.

In their own words

Voices on child support collects what policymakers, agency heads, judges and researchers have said about what Title IV-D is for, with every quote labelled Verified, Paraphrase or Attributed - unverified, plus video evidence from hearings and panels.

Incentives across the system

Does the family law industry profit from conflict? sets out how family cases are billed, staffed and run, what is documented about cost and duration, the rules against process-not-merit tactics, and the reforms aimed at those incentives - including the Title IV-D funding rules - with every source cited and the evidence gaps labelled.

Sources and credits

Copy link to this section https://mybmd.org/fyi/family-court-reforms/#sources-and-credits

The bill names and reform framing on this page were traced from the advocates who publish them. Crediting a source is not endorsing it: every legal status here is sourced to a legislature or a statute, and the two are kept separate throughout.

• Robert Garza - Texas family court reform advocate; publishes the numbered bill stack this map tracks. Written testimony filed with the North Dakota Senate Judiciary Committee, 2025-01-21.
• Mark Ludwig - Founder and executive director, Americans for Equal Shared Parenting. Proponent testimony in the official records of Kansas (SB 157, 2020), Pennsylvania (HB 1397, 2019) and Ohio (HB 508, 2022).
• The Dadvocate (Lauren) - Woman-led equal shared parenting advocacy and humour project. Identity taken from her own Patreon page; no surname is published on her own pages, so none is stated here.
• National Parents Organization - National shared parenting coalition encountered throughout the crawl. Named independently of the advocates above; this map does not assert a formal link between them.

Crawl log

Each advocacy claim below was followed to the official record before any status was set. Where an advocate claim and the official record disagree, the official record is what the map shows and the disagreement is noted.