The Seats Belong to the People

The State may act to protect children.

It may investigate credible allegations, impose necessary safeguards, allocate parental rights, restrict contact when supported by evidence, and place a child’s safety and well-being above the preferences of either parent.

What the State may not do is claim authority over a parent-child relationship and then allow delay, ambiguity, unaffordable review, fragmented records, technological barriers, and institutional indifference to consume that relationship while childhood passes.

The most consequential thing government can take from a parent is not money, property, employment, or reputation.

It is time with a child.

Money can sometimes be repaid. Property can sometimes be returned. Records can be corrected. Judgments can be reviewed. But a missed birthday cannot be rescheduled. A school year cannot be replayed. A relationship weakened during childhood does not remain frozen while courts process motions, clerks reconcile filings, vendors generate rejection notices, and institutions determine which office is responsible.

When that happens, the administration of family matters becomes more than inefficient or frustrating.

It becomes an egregious affront to the fundamental liberty interests of the People.

The Seats Are Public Trusts#

The People are not guests in their own government.

We are not administrative inconveniences to be managed, docket numbers to be moved, or troublesome outsiders who must earn the attention of institutions created in our name.

A judge’s bench, a clerk’s counter, a legislative chair, an executive office, an administrative post, and an oversight position are not private possessions. They are public trusts.

Those occupying them exercise authority that belongs to the People. Their titles do not convert delegated authority into personal ownership, nor does professional expertise relieve them of accountability for the consequences of how that authority is administered.

The Maine Constitution does not begin with the judiciary, the Governor, the Legislature, the bar, or the bureaucracy.

It begins with the People.

It declares that “All power is inherent in the people,” that government is “instituted for their benefit,” and that justice must be administered “promptly and without delay.” Those words are not ceremonial decoration. They identify who possesses the authority, who is supposed to benefit from its exercise, and what government owes the public when injury occurs.

The People do not exist to preserve the comfort, traditions, reputation, or administrative convenience of an institution.

The institution exists to preserve the liberty of the People.

Fundamental Must Mean Something#

The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly recognized the constitutional importance of the parent-child relationship.

In Troxel v. Granville, the Court described a parent’s interest in the care, custody, and control of a child as “perhaps the oldest” fundamental liberty interest it has recognized.

In Stanley v. Illinois, the Court held that a parent was entitled to an individualized hearing before the State took his children. The Court also rejected the idea that government may inflict a wrong merely because it might later be undone, recognizing that delay harms both the parent deprived of the children and the children subjected to uncertainty and dislocation.

In Santosky v. Kramer, the Court recognized that a parent’s fundamental interest does not disappear merely because the parent is imperfect, the relationship is strained, or custody has temporarily been lost.

And in M.L.B. v. S.L.J., the Court held that Mississippi could not make meaningful appellate review of a parental-rights termination depend upon whether an indigent parent could prepay thousands of dollars in record-preparation costs. M.L.B. involved permanent termination, not an ordinary post-judgment family dispute, and it should not be overstated. But it confirms a larger constitutional principle: when government places the parent-child bond itself at stake, meaningful process cannot become a luxury product reserved for those able to afford it.

These decisions do not guarantee a parent any preferred outcome.

They do not prevent courts from protecting children.

They do establish that family liberty is real, that individualized decision-making matters, that meaningful review matters, and that a remedy arriving after the relationship has been irretrievably altered may be no remedy at all.

A fundamental liberty interest cannot be celebrated in precedent while being administratively extinguished in practice.

Protection and Liberty Are Not Opposites#

Courts have a solemn responsibility to protect children from abuse, neglect, coercion, danger, and instability.

Constitutional accountability does not weaken that responsibility. It strengthens it by requiring government to distinguish actual danger from allegation, temporary caution from indefinite deprivation, a child’s feelings from an adult’s legal obligations, and genuine protection from administrative convenience.

Maine law reflects that balance.

It makes the child’s safety and well-being primary. It also directs courts to consider the child’s relationship with each parent, the child’s meaningful preference, stability, each parent’s capacity to encourage frequent and continuing contact, and each parent’s ability to cooperate. Maine law generally requires parental-rights orders to preserve each parent’s access to medical, dental, school, and related records unless the court specifically finds that access contrary to the child’s interests or sought for an improper purpose. It also authorizes hearings, more specific terms, replacement contact, and contempt remedies when an order is violated.

A teenager’s views matter.

His comfort matters.

His schedule, maturity, emotional condition, and sense of safety matter.

But the law treats those considerations as part of a broader best-interest analysis. A child should not be assigned the responsibility of interpreting judicial language, resolving disputes between adults, determining which parent’s legal interpretation is correct, or deciding whether an existing order will operate at all.

The adults are supposed to carry the conflict.

The professionals are supposed to reduce it.

The courts are supposed to resolve it.

The child is not supposed to become the court.

Delay Is Not Neutral#

Delay in a commercial dispute may increase interest, costs, or uncertainty. Those harms can sometimes be calculated and compensated.

Childhood cannot be recalculated.

While a family matter waits, the child continues to develop. Distance becomes normal. Missed contact becomes expectation. One household’s account of events can become the child’s only working narrative. Temporary restrictions become the status quo, and the status quo is later invoked as a reason to preserve itself.

A temporary order can therefore produce a permanent practical result without any court ever expressly ordering that result.

An order may recognize electronic contact but leave the platform, schedule, and adult facilitation undefined.

It may preserve access to medical and school records while portal credentials, provider information, notices, authorizations, or correct contact information remain unavailable.

It may contemplate progressive in-person contact without identifying who initiates scheduling, who provides transportation, what happens when a session is displaced, or how disputed compliance is promptly determined.

It may authorize enforcement in theory while the enforcement motion moves through form requirements, proposed-order rules, service-contact problems, document-separation requirements, correction notices, resubmissions, and relation-back instructions before any judicial officer reaches the substance.

Each event may appear minor when viewed from one institutional compartment.

A clerk sees a rejected filing.

A judge sees one motion.

A provider sees one appointment.

A school sees one access request.

An appellate court sees one record dispute.

An oversight body sees one complaint.

The family experiences one continuous deprivation.

In a child’s life, delay does not merely postpone the outcome. Delay becomes the outcome.

Written Rights and Real Rights#

My own public record is a case study in the difference between rights recognized on paper and rights made operational in life.

The February 11, 2026 order retained shared parental rights and responsibilities except where specifically allocated. It recognized access to medical, dental, and school records, continuing reunification therapy, an opportunity for reasonable daily electronic contact, and a pathway toward recurring in-person contact beginning no later than thirty days after the order, subject to stated conditions. It also warned that violations could produce contempt, more specific terms, replacement contact, or sanctions.

Within days, I requested the ordinary information necessary to make those provisions work: the current telephone number and electronic platform, a dependable contact window, therapy and transportation logistics, a concrete adult-managed process for in-person contact, school and medical information, insurance information, records access, and necessary authorizations.

I then sought a narrowly tailored interim order establishing those logistics. The requested relief included defined contact windows, transportation responsibility, therapy punctuality, school-punctuality reporting, records access, authorizations, and a prompt status conference. The stated purpose was to prevent delay, reduce conflict, and avoid repeated disputes and filings.

Those requests were not an attempt to obtain a predetermined outcome.

They were an attempt to make the existing order function.

The appellate-record problem followed the same pattern. A private-pay estimate required a deposit of $1,515.90 before preparation of the hearing transcript would begin. I sought the court’s electronic audio recording or, alternatively, a settled statement so that meaningful review would not depend entirely upon the ability to pay a four-figure deposit. More than six months after the February order, the practical implementation of parent-child contact, therapy, school and medical access, adult coordination, and records access remained disputed, irregular, or unresolved.

On August 3, that ambiguity reached a routine medical appointment. My teenage son telephoned me from the medical office and said he was “pretty sure” I was not supposed to be there and directed me to leave.

I did not enter the examination room or create a confrontation.

The current record does not establish who told him what, precisely what was said, or why he believed it. Those questions require evidence and a fair hearing.

But the event itself demonstrates the adult failure: a child was placed in the position of attempting to interpret and enforce a disputed legal restriction concerning his father’s participation in his healthcare.

The related enforcement materials then entered another electronic-filing rejection and correction cycle before the merits were reached. The child-impact problem was again converted into forms, proposed orders, service notices, packet reconstruction, and delay. That should never have been his burden.

A child cannot have a relationship with a PDF.

An order that is never made operational does not protect a relationship. It documents what the relationship was theoretically supposed to receive.

“High Conflict” Is Not an Adequate Analysis#

Family matters like mine are often labeled “high conflict.”

That phrase may describe the visible condition, but it does not identify its causes.

A neutral process must still ask who benefits from delay, who is complying to the fullest extent possible, who provides information, who refuses ordinary logistics, who seeks clarification, who turns ambiguity into leverage, and who transfers adult responsibility onto the child.

It must distinguish disagreement from obstruction.

It must distinguish distress from danger.

It must distinguish repeated attempts to obtain an action-capable remedy from repetition for its own sake.

Attaching the same label to everyone and waiting for the conflict to exhaust itself does not protect a child. It can conceal the conduct and institutional conditions sustaining the conflict.

Maine Has Already Acknowledged the Delay#

The statewide problem is not imaginary.

In the February 2026 State of the Judiciary address, Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill stated that “many family cases” remained “significantly delayed.” She also acknowledged longstanding understaffing, the need identified in a staffing study for 54 additional clerk positions, the importance of reliable technology, and historically low public trust.

Those acknowledgments matter.

Judges and clerks cannot be expected to solve structural understaffing through personal sacrifice. Court employees are not machines. Adequate staffing, training, buildings, and technology require sustained legislative and administrative support.

But resource constraints explain institutional pressure. They do not make the resulting deprivation harmless.

When the State knows that family cases remain delayed, knows that childhood time is irrecoverable, and knows that an unimplemented order may be indistinguishable from no order at all, it must redesign the process around the actual harm.

A docket remaining technically open is not the same as a relationship remaining intact.

Judicial independence is essential. Institutional immunity from criticism is not. The same 2026 address recognized that lawful public engagement with judicial work is not itself a threat to judicial independence. Public trust is preserved through accountability, not through demands for silence.

Digitizing Bureaucracy Is Not Modernizing Justice#

Maine’s electronic-court rules state that they are intended to facilitate public access and should be construed to secure simplicity, fairness, and the elimination of unjustifiable expense and delay. They also describe clerk acceptance review as ministerial.

That standard should be treated as an operational requirement.

A system that accepts a packet, waits for human review, identifies one defect, returns the filing, requires reconstruction and resubmission, and later identifies another objectively detectable issue is not reducing work.

It is multiplying work.

It consumes clerk time.

It consumes litigant time.

It generates duplicate notices and packet versions.

It complicates the record.

And when the filing concerns active parent-child contact, therapy, school access, or medical participation, it consumes childhood.

The institution cannot require a self-represented parent to repeat deterministic correction cycles and then point to the resulting volume as evidence that the parent is creating the burden.

That is a self-created failure mode.

Modernization means reducing the number of steps between a lawful request and a reasoned decision. It does not mean placing old bureaucracy behind a login screen.

What Maine Owes Its Families#

Maine does not need another abstract promise to treat children’s interests seriously. It needs enforceable operating standards designed around the reality that childhood cannot be restored.

Operationally Complete Orders#

Orders affecting parent-child contact should identify who must do what, by when, through which platform, with what transportation and exchange protocol, and what happens if implementation fails.

When medical, school, therapy, insurance, or portal access is preserved, the order should require the information, authorizations, and account-level access necessary to exercise that right.

Ambiguity should not become privately exploitable leverage.

Child-Impact Remedy Clocks#

A verified allegation that ordered contact, therapy, school participation, medical access, or records access has not been implemented should trigger prompt review.

The system should display the age of the request, the next required action, the office responsible, and the date by which a status conference or written determination must occur.

Families should not have to reconstruct a new litigation packet every time an existing order fails to function.

Meaningful Appellate Records#

Where an order substantially affects a parent-child relationship, meaningful review should not depend entirely upon wealth.

A usable electronic recording, appropriately reduced-cost transcript, or timely settled statement should be available when necessary to present preserved issues for review.

The precise constitutional requirement may differ among proceedings. The policy obligation should not: appellate review must be more than a theoretical door without an affordable way to reach it.

An Electronic-Filing Safe Harbor#

Time-sensitive child-related filings should receive one consolidated defect notice whenever reasonably possible, preservation of the original submission date where the rules permit it, a human escalation path, and a conventional-filing fallback when serial technical correction would materially delay relief.

Corrected iterations should be tracked as one substantive filing event, not mischaracterized as multiple new disputes.

Visible Routing and Public Measurements#

Every filing should have a visible status history showing whether it was submitted, returned, corrected, accepted, docketed, presented to a judicial officer, transferred, ruled upon, dismissed, or left pending.

Maine should publish metrics that measure more than the number of cases closed: time to interim order, time to enforcement hearing, age of pending child-related motions, time from order to implementation review, electronic-filing rejection reasons, correction cycles, transcript and audio availability, and the duration of temporary parent-child restrictions awaiting a merits determination.

What is measured can be corrected.

What remains hidden behind aggregate caseload statistics will continue.

Independent, Whole-Sequence Accountability#

Oversight must examine the complete institutional sequence: judicial action, clerk routing, attorney conduct, technology barriers, provider access, record availability, reassignment, recusal, and enforcement delay.

Parents, former child litigants, domestic-violence advocates, civil-liberties lawyers, clinicians, technologists, court employees, and independent public representatives should have meaningful roles in evaluating whether the system works in practice.

No institution should be permitted to isolate its own narrow involvement while the family absorbs the cumulative result.

The State Does Not Own Childhood#

Courts do not create the bond between parent and child.

The State may regulate that bond when necessary. It may impose lawful boundaries. It may protect a child from actual danger.

But it cannot responsibly treat the relationship as administrative inventory.

An order that cannot be implemented is not enough.

A hearing that arrives after the harm has hardened is not enough.

An appeal without a usable record is not enough.

An electronic system that multiplies correction cycles is not enough.

An oversight process that records procedures but never answers for outcomes is not enough.

Every person occupying a public seat in Maine should be required to answer one question:

Did the institution make the protected right real while there was still time to exercise it?

If the answer is no, an open docket is not a defense.

A signed order is not a defense.

A theoretical remedy is not a defense.

A future hearing after the relationship has been consumed is not a defense.

The authority belongs to the People.

The duty belongs to those occupying the seats.

The time belongs to our children.

Maine must administer family matters as though the Constitution means what it says, as though fundamental liberty is actually fundamental, and as though justice administered too late is justice denied in the only childhood a child will ever have.

The seats belong to the People. It is time they served us.

Accountability in our courts. Protection for our children. Justice for all.