Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique catch-22 for families with ongoing parenting cases. By materially changing the circumstances of everyday life while simultaneously closing the courts, the virus placed parents in impossible situations. Sometimes, parents had to decide whether to adhere to parenting schedules and perhaps expose their children to illness or death, or to disobey court orders and potentially expose themselves to possible serious legal penalties. In other parenting cases, the virus allowed opportunistic parents to wrongfully withhold their children while the courts were closed. In either situation, parents often did not qualify for emergency hearings and, even if they did, an unmanageable backlog in court proceedings realistically prevented their cases from being heard. The same pattern was observed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and it will logically take place any time a disaster causes legal problems and closes the courts. This article presents national data to reveal the extent to which courts closed during the pandemic and proposes a solution to these catch-22 problems: a system in which states activate special masters to act as mobile or virtual neutral third-party decision-makers. By employing such a system, states would not be exercising any authority that they do not already commonly use, and they would uphold their obligations to families even in difficult times.