By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Eleven years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the right to marry the person you love. Obergefell v. Hodges was a landmark — a decision that extended dignity, liberty, and equal protection to millions of Americans who had been excluded from that recognition for too long. It said, plainly, that every couple deserves the same rights.
No one is celebrating what happens when that marriage ends.
Family court is where constitutional protections go quiet. There is no guaranteed right to counsel. Judicial discretion is nearly unreviewable on appeal. A parent can lose access to their children based on allegations that would not survive scrutiny in a criminal proceeding — or even most civil ones. The same legal system that expanded the right to enter a marriage has constructed almost no floor under the rights of parents, and children, when one falls apart.
Love may be worth fighting for. So is due process.
The Gap Obergefell Didn’t Close
Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell grounded the right to marry in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of liberty and equal protection. The court enumerated what marriage confers: emotional support, financial protections, the right to make decisions for a spouse, recognition before the law.
None of that language reaches family court.
When a marriage dissolves, the proceedings that follow — dividing assets, establishing custody, determining support — unfold in a system with dramatically fewer procedural safeguards than almost any other civil forum. In criminal court, the state must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and defendants have a constitutional right to an attorney. In civil court, evidence must meet defined standards, and rulings are subject to meaningful appellate review.
Family court operates differently. Judges exercise sweeping discretion over outcomes that are among the most consequential a person will ever face — who raises their children, how often they see them, and under what conditions. That discretion, by design, is difficult to challenge on appeal. Appellate courts routinely defer to trial court findings in custody matters, reasoning that the judge who observed the parties is best positioned to evaluate credibility.
The result is a system where the stakes are extraordinarily high, and the procedural protections are comparatively thin.
When Litigation Becomes the Weapon
In a functioning co-parenting dispute, family court serves a narrow purpose: resolving genuine disagreements about what arrangement best serves the children. In a high-conflict case — particularly one where one parent is using the legal system as a tool of control or punishment — it becomes something else.
Extended litigation is expensive. Legal fees in contested custody cases routinely reach tens of thousands of dollars. For a parent of modest means, the financial attrition alone can force concessions that have nothing to do with what is best for the children involved. A well-resourced party who files motion after motion, demands evaluation after evaluation, and contests every order — regardless of merit — can effectively exhaust the other parent into submission.
The system, as designed, has few mechanisms to stop this.
Court-appointed professionals — guardians ad litem, custody evaluators, parenting coordinators — wield significant authority in these cases. They conduct interviews, observe family dynamics, and make recommendations that judges frequently adopt wholesale. Their accountability, however, is limited. Licensing boards rarely discipline professionals for poor work product in custody cases. Parties who believe an evaluator has acted improperly have limited recourse and no guarantee of reassignment.
These are not hypothetical concerns. They are the documented experience of parents across the country — across gender lines, across income levels, across jurisdictions.
Jeff Reichert is a Maryland father who hasn’t seen his son since 2022. Every criminal charge filed against him was dismissed. No investigation into the falsehood of the charges. He had primary custody before the proceedings began. What followed — five appeals, a 90-day no-contact order, an ongoing federal case, and an appellate court opinion that was never published as precedent — is documented in court records spanning more than a decade. The case raises specific questions about how Maryland’s family courts handle disability accommodations, given that the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court repeatedly denied Reichert’s ADA accommodation requests for remote access to hearings — requests that a federal magistrate later granted.
Brenna Gano is a Silicon Valley mother whose custody dispute was routed through a private judging system in San Mateo County, California. Documents from the case allege that a tightly connected network of lawyers, therapists, and a private judge coordinated decisions inside her case while extracting more than $350,000 in fees. A Family Court Services counselor assigned to the case faces allegations of fabricating agreements and disregarding disability-related evidence. A settlement Gano signed in 2022, she says, was obtained under duress, without proper accommodations for her disabilities. A full-day trial is now set for December 28, 2026.
Rhonda Reyna was a criminalist for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Crime Laboratory — a professional who helped prosecute cases and testify in court — before becoming a defendant herself. What began as a custody dispute escalated into felony charges filed despite law enforcement findings that initially cleared her. Key evidence, including statements from her child, was allegedly suppressed, including accounts of domestic violence and abuse. She says she was coerced into a no-contest plea by a privatized indigent defense system that failed to provide meaningful representation. That plea was then used against her in family court proceedings.
Marc Fishman is a disabled father in Westchester County, New York, whose case began when he was arrested during a court-approved supervised visit with his autistic son after false accusations were made by the mother. The arresting officer was later identified as having a record of misconduct. Fishman, who has a traumatic brain injury and hearing loss, says courts repeatedly denied ADA accommodations that a federal judge later ordered. The New York Court of Appeals dismissed his appeal on jurisdictional grounds. His children are now adults. He says he still cannot reach them.
These cases span four jurisdictions — Maryland, California, and New York — and involve two fathers, two mothers. Disabled parents. What they share is a documented pattern: court-appointed or court-connected professionals with significant authority and limited accountability, proceedings that generated consequences difficult or impossible to reverse on appeal, and a system that in each instance continued operating without publicly accounting for what the record shows.
This Is Not a Fathers’ Rights Piece
It needs to be said plainly, because the framing matters: the failures documented here are not gendered failures in a simple sense.
Fathers are disproportionately affected by certain structural biases — default custody presumptions, the historical weight of maternal preference in judicial decision-making — and that disparity is documented and worth naming. But the targeted parent phenomenon, in which one party weaponizes family court proceedings against the other, is not exclusively experienced by fathers.
Mothers are targeted parents. Grandparents who have been primary caregivers and find themselves without standing are targeted by a system that does not recognize what they have provided.
What unites these experiences is not the gender of the parent. It is the structure of the system — one that offers wide discretion to judges, limited accountability for court-appointed professionals, and no practical ceiling on how long litigation can be prolonged by a party willing to sustain it.
The principle that every family deserves equal protection and basic procedural fairness is not a fathers’ rights position. It is a due process position.
We have a legal system that protects the right to begin a family. We do not yet have one that reliably protects the rights of parents and children when families come apart.
What Reform Requires
The conversation about family court reform has gained traction in recent years, driven partly by federal legislation and partly by the organizing of parents who have lived through the system’s failures.
Kayden’s Law — named for Kayden Mancuso, a seven-year-old Pennsylvania girl killed by her father during a court-ordered unsupervised visit — established federal guidelines directing states to take coercive control and domestic violence more seriously in custody determinations. It was an important step, and an overdue one.
But Kayden’s Law is not perfect, and it addresses one category of failure. The broader structural problems remain largely untouched.
What meaningful reform would require: baseline due process standards that apply uniformly across family court proceedings, rather than leaving procedural protections entirely to judicial discretion. Accountability mechanisms for court-appointed professionals — licensing standards with teeth, processes for challenging evaluators whose work product is demonstrably inadequate. Appellate review standards that allow meaningful scrutiny of custody decisions rather than near-total deference. And some mechanism — whether through sanctions, cost-shifting, or case management — to deter the use of litigation as attrition.
None of this is radical. These are the kinds of procedural protections that exist, in some form, in almost every other area of civil law. The question is why family court — where the stakes include the relationship between parents and children — has been treated as an exception.
Parental commitments do not evaporate when a marriage fails.
The Right That Doesn’t End at the Courthouse Door
Obergefell said that every couple deserves the same rights and dignity. It grounded that principle in the Constitution’s deepest commitments — liberty, equality, the right to make fundamental decisions about one’s own life and family.
Those commitments do not evaporate when a marriage fails.
The right to a meaningful relationship with your children. The right to be heard in a proceeding that will shape your family’s future — your future. The right to basic procedural fairness — to know the standards being applied, to challenge evidence being used against you, to have the outcome reviewed if something went wrong. These are not privileges. They are, or should be, the floor.
Eleven years after Obergefell, we have a legal system that protects the right to begin a family. We do not yet have one that reliably protects the rights of parents and children when families come apart.
That gap is not inevitable. It is a policy choice. And it is one that affects far more families than the public conversation about family court reform has yet acknowledged.
Love is worth fighting for. So is the legal framework that protects what love builds — including after it ends.
Father & Co. covers parental rights and family court accountability across gender lines. Sources in this article are named with their consent. If you have a family court experience you believe warrants coverage, contact us at fatherand.co.
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