Riverside County Dept. of Child Support Services v. Briscoe CA4/3

I. INTRODUCTION

Appellant Tim Briscoe challenges the denial of his request to set aside all California child support orders made up to the time Michigan formally relinquished jurisdiction over child support to California in January 2011. This appeal presents a series of complex issues involving the interaction of the exclusive jurisdiction provisions of both UIFSA (the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act) and the federal FFCCSOA (Full Faith and Credit for Child Support Orders Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1738B), provisions of the California Family Code that authorize and govern county welfare reimbursement actions (including §§ 4002, 4909, 17000, 17402 and 174041), a July 1999 Michigan child support judgment, and on top of all that, a problem of minimum contacts and personal jurisdiction that takes us back to our law school days. To summarize: (1) For the period 1998 to September 2008, when appellant Tim Briscoe’s then-attorney, possibly inadvertently, made a general appearance on his behalf, California had no personal jurisdiction over Briscoe. Briscoe was not properly served under California law in 1998 when he was living in Michigan as a citizen of Michigan. Furthermore the record…