Can I change attorney ad litem? I’m in a custody battle in Arkansas. We still have 10 months until the final date of court. Our attorney ad litem appointed for our 2 year old daughter is extremely biased against me. I can feel it and don’t trust her. Can I request the court to change AAL?
This person is appointed by the court to look after the child's interests recognizing that the child's interests may be different from those of the parents. As @phoog notes in the comments: the attorney ad litem is not your lawyer. The question suggests that you might not understand this (you mention &quot;our&quot; attorney ad litem). The job of the attorney ad litem is to represent your daughter's interests, which might not align with yours. This is why you need your own lawyer. The attorney ad litem might be skeptical of you and your submissions to the court; that's her job. It doesn't necessarily mean that she is biased against you. If her skepticism is well founded, an attempt to have her replaced may work against you. (FYI, most jurisdictions call this person a &quot;guardian ad litem&quot; or GAL, but Arkansas uses atypical terminology.) Our attorney ad litem appointed for our 2 year old daughter is extremely biased against me. This is not a reason to remove the person appointed. It is their job to distrust parents and provide an independent opinion to the court. There could be grounds for removing a guardian ad litem (e.g. a personal relationship with one of the parties prior to the litigation), but nothing in this question suggests that any relevant facts are present. You would be much better served trying to figure out what causes the guardian ad litem to distrust you and to find a way to show that person that their distrust of you is ill-founded.
Are there actual laws written, or de facto situations (e.g. let's say another law specifies that a child can't be physically forced to go anywhere without causing abuse) where the child can refuse to attend? Are there "tiers" to the age; Is it true that a temper tantrum of a 5 year old would be seen as such, but the refusal of a 17 year would be legally accepted? This is a hard question to answer that doesn't have a neat resolution. Very little pertaining to the authority of a parent over a child is codified in statutory law and there is not a clear cut age at which a child has "freedom of conscience" vis-a-vis a parent. Most of the law related to children concerns allocation of parenting time and parental decision making between divorced, separated or unmarried parents; abuse and neglect; and juvenile delinquency. There is also usually a snippet of criminal law stating that certain kinds of uses of force to discipline children do not constitute crimes. But, part of why it doesn't come up very much is that older children are usually socialized in a manner that causes them to show a certain amount of respect for the wishes of their parents. It also doesn't come up much for children who aren't in their late teens, because the complete economic dependence of children on their parents or guardians gives the parents considerable power of their children that doesn't require the exercise of physical force. Also, it is quite dependent upon how the issue presents itself. No law enforcement agency is going to aid a parent in forcibly dragging a kid to church against their will. But, no social services agency is going to remove a kid from a home because his birthday party will be cancelled if he doesn't go to the church of his parents' choice the Sunday before his birthday. There are also some subtle but important distinctions between states on the issue of emancipation. In Colorado, emancipation is a statement about the empirical reality. If a child is self-supporting and lives apart from parents or guardians then the child is an emancipated minor. It is not a status granted by a court, it is a status acknowledged by courts when evaluating other issues. In California, a child is not emancipated unless a court grants a child that status and a child who is de facto emancipated without the leave of a court is guilty of a "status offense" (the New York State term for someone in this state is PINS for "person in need of supervision"). Basically, if a parent can force a child to go to church by means that don't constitute abuse or neglect and don't exceed the level of force authorize for child discipline in the criminal code, then they can do it, and if they can't manage that, then they can't do it. Many states have a "status offense" that allows government intervention with the cooperation of a parent or guardian in cases where an "uncontrollable" child is defiant and simply will not give any heed to the parent or guardian's instructions. In practice, the older a child is, the less likely someone viewing a parent's conduct forcing a child to do something is to be viewed as acceptable or legally justified. The legal rights of children in a school setting are also age dependent under the case law, although not always in a really well defined way. Controls on student expression that would be uncontroversial for elementary school students may be looked upon by the law with disfavor for high school students and clearly prohibited for adults. Perhaps one useful way to conceptualize it is that trying to make a child attend a particular kind of religious service is not considered an improper purposes for a parent of any minor to utilize the resources available to the parent to do so, but the range of resources available to a parent with regard to an adult child is much narrower.
This is not possible, simply as a matter of definitions and legal terminology. Someone who is "represented by one or more attorneys" is by definition not pro se which means representing yourself without an attorney. There are very rare instances in criminal trials involving serious consequences in which a pro se defendant is allowed to have an attorney advisor who does not represent them in court in an agency capacity, but, first, people who do that almost always lose and are almost always mentally ill (although not necessarily eligible for an insanity defense), and second, because courts generally don't allow this in any other circumstance (at least in court). The concept of getting advice from an attorney without having full fledged representation is called a "limited representation" and the law regarding limited representations more generally varies greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and even between different courts in the same place. For example, Colorado's state courts and Colorado's federal courts have different rules for limited representations.
Once you withdrew the complaint without prejudice, any statute of limitations benefit you obtained from filing the lawsuit evaporated. From a legal perspective, it is as if you never filed at all, except that the lawsuit that was filed proves that you had notice of the claim at the time you filed, so you cannot take advantage of any "discovery rule" that allows a statute of limitations to start running from the date that you knew or should have known of your right to file a lawsuit. In all likelihood, the statute of limitations has now run, although that would depend upon the jurisdiction in which it was filed. Some jurisdictions toll the statute of limitations during a period of minority, but that tolling might very well be insufficient to allow the claim to be filed 20 years later.
Was/is it permissible for judges in the US to talk ex-parte like that? No. Ex parte interactions of that sort are not allowed. See, for instance, Disciplinary Counsel v. Bachman, 2020-Ohio-732 (Dec. 18, 2020) and Maze v. Judicial Conduct Commission, 2019-SC-0691-RR (Dec. 17, 2020). An example of less recent decision but with a reporter citation number is Comm'n on Judicial Performance v. Bozeman, 302 So.3d 1217 (2020). For situations of imminent risk of irreparable harm, procedural law provides for ex parte motions and ex parte petitions, such as this granted petition for Personal Protection Order. See M[ichigan]CR 3.7003(G). But the scenarios you depict fall short of the necessity for which ex parte provisions are intended. do the above scenes in the movies essentially portray judicial misconduct? Yes. A judge's house is inappropriate for communicating, let alone ex parte, his ruling (I am not knowledgeable of the films but my understanding of your description is that that judge made the ruling on the application). As for The Untouchables, any evidence of jurors' &amp; judges' conflict of interest and likely bias has to be filed in court and comply with procedural law so that all parties have an opportunity to litigate the matter.
Not successfully It is not required that a person knows they are dealing with an agent of the principal rather than the principal directly - an agent speaks with the principal’s voice. Robert has consented to allow Elizabeth to act as his agent. It actually doesn’t matter if he consented before she acted or afterwards, he has agreed to be bound by Elizabeth’s actions. Rachel &amp; Jared have agreed to enter the lease and indicated as much by signing the document. It doesn’t matter who signed it for the landlord or even if it was signed - leases have to be in writing but there is no common law rule that they need to be signed.
Is an attorney permitted to ask questions like those in either paragraphs two and three? Yes. That does not mean that they will be considered relevant or even appropriate, though. Is the witness allowed to decline to answer such questions for reason of irrelevance, or other grounds? Yes. In general, though, it would be safer for the witness to state an objection (be it on the basis of irrelevance, confrontational, asked &amp; answered, as to form, etc.) and answer the question nonetheless, rather than simply refusing to answer it. By simply declining to answer a question regardless of the basis for refusal, the witness risks affording a crooked lawyer the opportunity to falsely generalize that the witness was uncooperative. One exception to the idea of "object-and-then-answer" is where some privilege is the alleged basis for the objection, since the substance of the answer could be such that it amounts to waiving the privilege even where that privilege is legitimate. The witness may also opt to answer the lawyer's irrelevant questions even without stating an objection. Some questions are so obviously irrelevant, dull, or stupid that a failure to raise an objection will be inconsequential. In such scenarios, raising objections can only lengthen the deposition transcript and make it harder to read. For a real-life example of deposition with plenty of dull questions, take a look at the transcript (which I split in parts one, two and three) of the 4-hour deposition where I myself was the witness (you can download the case file, almost in its entirety, from this page). You will notice that I did not raise objections during the deposition, the main reason being what I explained above: To avoid giving the opposing counsel an opportunity to falsely accuse me in court of being uncooperative during deposition. Furthermore, addressing the crook's futile questions (1) projects transparency and helps on the witness's part, and (2) precludes a false &amp; misleading impression as if the witness had something to hide. After all, wrongdoers are the ones most interested in eluding testimony in ways very similar to this other deposition. The reason of being of objections is precisely that the law "is aware" that, as a matter of fact, lawyers indulge in all kinds of abusive questions when taking sworn testimony --be it in trial or at deposition-- of a witness.
The first question would be whether those papers are indeed "legit", and we don't do product reviews. Assuming the company didn't mess up and she was legally served, the next question would be whether she responded (in the legal sense) or not. If she failed to respond at all within 21 days (add 9 days if she is out of state), then your next step would be to file default divorce paperwork (presumably that's covered in the service you paid for). If she agreed to the divorce and the courts knows that, then you file some more paperwork and she doesn't have to show up to anything. If she disagreed, there will be an "answer" and possibly a counterpetition. There is an exchange of paperwork w.r.t. assets, a mandatory mediation stage, more paperwork, disclosures etc. and a pre-trial conference, followed by a trial. If you are at this stage, attendance is mandatory. As long as you have proof of service, nobody requested a postponement, and there is some evidence to support your claim, a default judgment can be issued. It's not clear what "divorce proceeding" you are referring to that involves her attendance. However, you can file divorce paperwork yourself or using an online service, and using an online service does not render the paperwork illegitimate. It's not guaranteed that the service did what would be necessary for you to get the outcome you desire, but that's beyond the scope of what we can tell you.