Please read this before downloading anything. It will save you, and the broader effort, real trouble.
These materials exist to help structural reform of family court accountability — the kind of reform that operates on patterns, statutes, published data, and legislative process. They are designed for citizens, journalists, researchers, advocates, and policymakers who want to make American family courts subject to the same baseline transparency norms that govern every other publicly funded institution.
The toolkit is built on a single premise: a system that does not measure its own outcomes cannot be held accountable for them. Everything here is aimed at producing measurement — through public records, through proposed legislation, through investigative reporting — so that the policy conversation can become empirical rather than anecdotal.
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.
That is not what they are for, and using them that way will hurt you and hurt the broader effort.
Specifically, please do not:
Three reasons this matters:
One — it will hurt your case. Courts have wide latitude to interpret coordinated outside pressure as bad faith. Your lawyer, if you have one, will tell you the same thing.
Two — it will hurt the reform effort. The single most effective argument the family law establishment has against accountability is that reform advocates are “disappointed litigants” using the language of reform to relitigate their own cases. Every individual user of this toolkit who matches that description gives that argument weight, for years, in every forum where it is made.
Three — it confuses the goal. The reform agenda is structural. It is about whether the system as a whole publishes data, defines its standards, and is subject to outside review. Your individual case, however legitimate the grievance, is not the lever that changes the system. The pattern across thousands of cases is.
The most useful thing you can do is wait until your matter is fully concluded, then come back. A fully resolved case — one with no pending matters, no ongoing exposure, and a documentary record you can share — is genuinely useful to the reform effort. An active case is not.
In the meantime, the materials remain here. You can read them. You can think about how they apply to your state. You should not file anything based on them while your case is open.
If your matter is fully concluded and you would like to be part of the reform record — through journalism, through legislative testimony, or by contributing to the data corpus — there will be a way to do that on this site. Watch for the contribution form.
Reform that wins is calm, evidence-based, and structural. Reform that loses is angry, personal, and case-specific. The materials in this toolkit are written in the first register on purpose. If you adapt them, please keep them there. Anything that reads as a personal vendetta — even when the personal grievance is justified — gives the opposition exactly what it needs to dismiss the entire effort.
The system we are trying to change has spent a century being insulated from honest measurement. That insulation is held in place by institutional incentives, professional networks, and statutory immunity — not by individual bad actors. Aim at the structure, not the people inside it. The structure is where reform happens.
Thank you for taking this seriously.