Legislatures Consider Replacing UCCJA With UCCJEA

Former Section 1 -- INTRODUCTION, PURPOSES AND CONSTRUCTION SECTION.

Article by Richard Crouch, Attorney at Law, Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703) 528-6700;
Copyright Richard Crouch 1999. Originally Published in Family Law News, a Virginia
State Bar Publication

Table of Contents of UCCJA Article | Introduction

The Commissioners have deleted the UCCJA's initial section on Purposes and Construction. Why, you might ask, should we not have a findings and purposes clause? In the UCCJA it was §1. Now we will have only the paragraph that the Commissioners have included as the "Comment" to §101. The UCCJA, more than practically any other statute, does rely on its legislative statement of purposes for the construction of all the individual operating sections. The UCCJA findings and purposes clause (Section 1) was considered so important that our Virginia Supreme Court read it into Virginia law word for word as case law in the very first UCCJA case that it decided, Middleton v. Middleton, 227 Va. 82, 314 S.E. 2d 362 (1984), the General Assembly's suppression of it notwithstanding. Many findings and purposes clauses are a bad idea generally within the context of Virginia statutory law, but in this particular case, having one is important.

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