A set of templates, model legislation, and outreach materials for citizens, journalists, and researchers who want to make American family courts subject to the same baseline transparency norms that govern every other publicly funded institution.
The American family court system decides custody, visitation, and child support in tens of thousands of cases every year. It publishes essentially no performance data. Unlike federal courts, public schools, hospitals, or any other major publicly funded institution, family court operates outside the empirical scrutiny that governs the rest of public life.
This toolkit exists to change that — through ordinary public records law, ordinary legislation, and ordinary investigative journalism. Nothing here is novel. The same accountability mechanisms that govern every other corner of state government are being applied here, for the first time, at scale.
One thing here is worth saying up front, because it is the part most reform efforts learn too late. Winning a records request is not the same as getting usable data. Agencies release the same underlying facts in fifty incompatible shapes, under undocumented field names, flattened into page images — and facts that cannot be compared never become patterns. That outcome is not a technical accident. It is produced, decision by defensible decision, in the legal review that shapes what an agency records and how. The Schema That Never Gets Written explains the mechanism and gives you the request clause that goes after it.
The materials are free to use, free to adapt, and designed to be picked up and run with locally — in your state, with your representative, with your local press.
If you are currently in a family court matter — a contested custody case, a child support enforcement action, a modification proceeding, a contempt action — please do not use these materials as litigation tools.
They are designed for structural reform: published data, model legislation, investigative reporting on patterns. Using them as part of an active case will hurt your case and hurt the broader effort.
Read the full use policy →Four adaptable resources. Each works on its own; together they form a sequence.
The foundation. A template letter, target-agency map, state-specific notes, and a denial-response playbook for requesting the family court administrative data the system has not published. Designed to be used in any state, by anyone, without legal training.
Read on the web →Winning a records request and receiving unusable data is the normal outcome, and it is not an accident. This resource explains how the absence of a common records schema gets produced in agency legal review, and gives you a request clause for the data dictionary, retention schedule, and vendor data model — the documents that describe the records, and that are far harder to withhold than the records themselves.
Read on the web →A specific, narrow, defensible piece of legislation any state legislator can introduce. Requires the state's family court system to publish performance data the way every other publicly funded institution already does. Includes a one-pager, an initial email, and meeting talking points.
Read on the web →A media one-pager, pitch email template, and guidance for bringing the family court accountability story to reporters in your region. Designed for local advocacy networks and individual citizens with media contacts.
Read on the web →The instinct most reform efforts get wrong is pitching journalists and legislators before having data. The result is a flurry of attention that produces no follow-through, after which the story is "old news" and the doors close.
The sequence that works:
This is a multi-year project. Reform on family court accountability is realistically a 5–10 year effort in any given state. The transparency bill is year one. The downstream reforms — guardian ad litem certification, immunity reform, child support enforcement restructuring — come later, supported by the data that the first bill produces.
Two long-form articles lay out the structural argument that this toolkit operationalizes:
If you are new to this argument, read the family court piece first. The toolkit makes more sense as the natural next step from the structural critique that piece presents.