Moving Child Custody CAse to GA

That depends. The jurisdiction for maintaining the custody order is going to be the courts of the state and county where the child lives. Even where a child resides with each parent 50% of the time, one of the parents is going to be named is the primary custodian. That person's residence will be considered the child's primary residence. You will need to review your order to determine the answer to your question. If you are the primary custodian, then you can domesticate the custody and support orders in Georgia for maintenance and enforcement. If the other parent is the primary custodian, jurisdiction for maintenance and enforcement of the orders remains in PA. ~ Kem Eyo

The short answer is that you will probably not be successful if you so file. I believe that the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act ("UCCJEA") is the law in Pennsylvania, just as it is the law here in Georgia. This means that Pennsylvania has exclusive, continuing jurisdiction over the child custody determination until certain circumstances arise. Basically, so long as either the child or a parent of the child continues to live in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania will continue to have exclusive, continuing jurisdiction. In order for a transfer to occur, you will probably have to get the Pennsylvania court to determine that it no longer has such exclusive, continuing jurisdiction. A Georgia court could only take jurisdiction if the Georgia court determined that neither the child nor the child's parents resides in Pennsylvania. Obviously, that is not the case in your situation. The UCCJEA is not a simple law. In order to get a better understanding of how it would operate in your situation, you should see an attorney familiary with the UCCJEA and out-of-state custody situations.

You have an interesting scenario. The 6 month requirement to establish child custody juridiction under the UCCJEA is usually for an initial child custody determination. if you already have a PA order, the custody determination in PA would be binding despite the child residing in Georgia for 6 months, which I am not so sure you could estalbish anyway since you have a joint custody agreement. The threshold issue in my opinion would be jurisdiction over the mother in the State of Georgia since you already have an inital custody determination in Pennsylvania in light of a possible domestication of a foreign (PA) judgment in Georgia. Your best option is to at least retain an attorney for a one hour consult so the UCCJEA act can be extensibvley researched and a workable case management plan developed.