Illinois Supreme Court declines to recognize a claim for interference with the parent-child relationship

Last Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court published an opinion in a case called Hulsh v. Hulsh in which it declined to recognize a cause of action for interference with the parent-child relationship.  The issue in the case started when the mother of two minor children successfully regained custody of her children in an action filed in federal district court in Illinois against the children’s father.  The mother then filed a state court action in Cook County against her former mother-in-law and brother-in-law, alleging tortious interference with her custodial rights and aiding and abetting tortious interference with her custodial rights, seeking to recover the expenses that she incurred in the federal district court action to regain custody of her children.

The Cook County circuit court dismissed those claims for failure to state a claim, and the appellate court affirmed the dismissal pointing out that Illinois courts have declined to recognize a cause of action for tortious interference with a parent’s custodial rights, regardless of the damages claimed.  

The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court and the court affirmed and explicitly stated that it preferred to defer the question of whether to recognize such a cause of action to the legislative branch.  

You can find a copy of the opinion in the Illinois Supreme Court website.  Go here and scroll down or search by date.

Update on the status of the blog

  If you are a long time reader of this blog you will have noticed that I have not posted anything in months and that I posted less frequently than usual in the past couple of years.  The reason for this is that I have been slowly moving toward retirement and that I have started to spend more time on other courses I teach and on projects that I want to pay attention to in the near future.

I have been posting my comments here for more than 15 years which is longer than the average lifespan of most blogs.  Now it is time for me to start to cut back a little and manage my time more efficiently.  I will continue to post commentary from time to time but, more than likely, not very frequently.  

I started this blog as a way to provide my students access to stories from the news related to what we cover in class, but which we did not have time to discuss in the classroom.  Essentially, it was meant to provide supplementary readings.  Slowly but surely, however, people other than my students started to pay attention and eventually I had more “outside” readers than students following the posts.  

I want to thank each and every one of you for following the blog, reading the stories, and for sending me materials to comment on and messages of support and criticism.