Case Update (23 Oct 2026): Fallon v. Fallon; Massachusetts affirms “default” custody jurisdiction under its UCCJA where the Mother took the child to South Korea three days before the Father filed
The parties married in California in 2019 and were living in South Korea in 2022, when their child was born. In February 2023, the family traveled to California, and in March 2023 they moved to Massachusetts, living in the paternal grandparents’ home. On Friday, August 18, 2023, the Mother took the child to South Korea. The following Monday, the Father filed for divorce in the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court and asked for an order requiring the child’s immediate return. The court granted the Father temporary sole custody and ordered the child returned. The Father then filed a Hague Abduction Convention petition in South Korea. In March 2024, the Massachusetts court entered a divorce judgment giving the Father sole legal and physical custody. A South Korean trial court ordered the child returned in May 2024, an appellate court affirmed in July 2024, and authorities returned the child to the Father in Massachusetts in May 2025. A few weeks later, the Mother moved to vacate the custody judgment as void for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. The court denied her motion without a hearing.
The Appeals Court affirmed in a summary decision. Under Appeals Court Rule 23.0, a summary decision is primarily directed to the parties, may not fully address the facts or the panel’s reasoning, and reflects only the views of the three-judge panel. It may be cited for its persuasive value, but it is not binding precedent. The Father conceded that Massachusetts was not the child’s home state, because the child had lived there for just short of six months when he filed. No other state was the home state either, because the child had been in South Korea for less than a week. That left “default” jurisdiction, which required a significant connection with Massachusetts and substantial evidence available there about the child. Nearly six months living there with his parents and paternal grandparents satisfied both. The Mother argued that South Korea remained the home state because the child was born there and lived there for nearly eight months, and the time in the United States was only a temporary absence. She said the trip to California was so she could renew her green card, and the stay in Massachusetts came before a planned move to California. However, she never made the temporary absence argument in her motion, and she had acknowledged, without disputing, the Father’s statement that the family left South Korea to move to California. Because she raised no factual dispute, no evidentiary hearing was needed. She also did not claim she had been denied notice or an opportunity to be heard on custody.
This is a Massachusetts decision, and Massachusetts still has not enacted the UCCJEA. It retains its version of the UCCJA, the Massachusetts Child Custody Jurisdiction Act, G. L. c. 209B. While the terminology is very similar to the UCCJEA, the UCCJA lists four bases for jurisdiction: home state, significant connection (which Massachusetts calls “default” jurisdiction), emergency, and appropriate forum. It does not give them a specific priority. Giving home state jurisdiction priority over the other bases was a change made in the UCCJEA when the Uniform Law Commission drafted and approved it in 1997. Massachusetts’ own text does make default jurisdiction available only where no other state has home state jurisdiction, which is why the Mother’s temporary absence argument mattered.
