The Law Office of Brion L. Gardner Blog

In an ideal world, a child benefits from the love and support of both its parents and its extended family, including grandparents. In fact, this is not always the case, and well-meaning relatives do not always agree about parenting and child rearing. Under some circumstances, courts in this State will order and enforce a schedule of visitation rights for grandparents to spend time with minor grandchildren despite parental objections.

This post deals with a developing area of law in Tennessee, sometimes called paternity fraud. The Supreme Court of Tennessee in 2012 recognized that a common law action for damages may be maintained under some circumstances where a man has been paying child support as the result of a woman’s false representation that the child for whose benefit the support is ordered is that of the child support obligor.[i] This is a developing area of law, and some questions remain as yet unanswered.

You will recall from Part I the facts of our hypothetical: 

Civil contempt, criminal contempt or substantive crime? Part I