John Sylvester was the counsel of record in the controversial Abdelqader v. Abraham published opinion. Why was it controversial? Because the Court of Appeal thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court, which had held in F.P. v. Monier that just because the trial judge forgets to make a required written finding you don’t get an automatic get-a-new-trial-free card. Abdelqader held that, in custody matters, you do get an automatic get-a-new-trial-free card.
In this first part of our discussion, John lays out the all-important statement of decision process, and the constitutional mandate that led the Supreme Court to hold that a defective statement of decision doesn’t give you an automatic get-a-new-trial-free card.
That sets up part two of our discussion in the next episode in which we discuss analogous situations with the Racial Justice Act, and in the example of family law financial disclosures—where in a closely analogous situation the Court of Appeal held exactly the opposite of Abdelqader. John explains what attorneys are supposed to do with two conflicting authorities—with one of them being the Supreme Court.
John Sylvester’s biography and LinkedIn profile.
Appellate Specialist Jeff Lewis' biography, LinkedIn profile, and Twitter feed.
Appellate Specialist Tim Kowal's biography, LinkedIn profile, Twitter feed, and YouTube page.
Sign up for Not To Be Published, Tim Kowal’s weekly legal update, or view his blog of recent cases.
The California Appellate Law Podcast thanks Casetext for sponsoring the podcast. Listeners receive a discount on Casetext Basic Research at casetext.com/CALP. The co-hosts, Jeff and Tim, were also invited to try Casetext’s newest technology, CoCounsel, the world’s first AI legal assistant. You can discover CoCounsel for yourself with a demo and free trial at casetext.com/CoCounsel.
Announcer 0:03
welcome to the California appellate podcast, a discussion of timely trial tips and the latest cases in news coming from the California Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court. And now your hosts, Tim Kowal and Jeff Lewis, welcome
Tim Kowal 0:17
everyone. I am Jeff Lewis and I'm Tim kowal AS certified appellate specialists. Both Jeff and I face a lot of unusual problems that come up at trial and on appeal, and in this podcast, bringing you recent cases and guests, we expose you to the unusual. If you find this podcast helpful, please recommend it to a colleague,
Jeff Lewis 0:33
and please rate us on podcasts. On Apple podcast page right now, the Texas appellate law podcast has 45 reviews, and we only have 20. We're in competition with those guys, so leave us a nice, positive review.
Tim Kowal 0:44
Yeah, we have a friendly rivalry going, going with those guys, and so we'd like to edge them out, but, but just speaking of unusual, one of the more surprising cases that you and I have covered since the podcast has come online was an appeal that automatically reversed a custody determination, just because the trial court, the family court, had not written out its underlying factual findings. That case was Abdel Kader versus Abraham, and today we're privileged to be joined by the respondents Counsel of record in that case. John Sylvester. John Sylvester is a San Diego family law appeals attorney practicing primarily in appeals and Ritz trial litigation and neutral mediation. He is a dual certified family law specialist and appellate law specialist certified by the state bar California. John's very active in the family law community. Another reason we were interested to talk with him about the Abdelkader case and the tremors that that I suspect may be, may be caused by that case, John helped to co found the Thomas Jefferson law school, First Family Law self help clinic, and he volunteers with the family Family Violence appellate project and the access to appellate Justice Program, bringing appeals on behalf of survivors of domestic violence and indigent appellants. John's also been lead appellate attorneys on several family law and civil appeals, including several successful, fuller partial reversals and several published cases. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank
John Sylvester 2:10
you very much for having me.
Tim Kowal 2:11
Well, in addition to what I just read there in your bio, tell us a little bit more about your practice, and as Jeff likes to call you unicorns, you dual certified specialist. Tell us a little bit about your path to becoming dual certified in both appellate and family law,
John Sylvester 2:26
certainly. So I'm going into my 10th year of practice here. I'm a lead attorney with the Southern California based firm of Cajun miles, we do strictly family law, and I am their local appellate wonk that handles that those cases for him, and I started, you got people
Tim Kowal 2:44
come, come down the hallway, poke their head in your door and ask, I got this bizarre situation going on in my case, help me unravel it?
John Sylvester 2:53
Absolutely? Yeah, sometimes I have to close and lock my door and close the blind so I can get some work done. Because it's, you know, really easy to run down the hall and, you know, try and peg me for, hey, can you help me with my request for a statement of decision? It's due tomorrow.
Tim Kowal 3:07
Yeah, yes, and statements of decision, something we'll be talking about shortly. Yeah, so tell us you you became a family law Certified Specialist first, I believe, yes, that's right,
John Sylvester 3:17
yeah. So I started out as a trial attorney, and I became certified as a family law specialist, mostly just doing trials in 2020 and it was right around that same exact time that I actually started moving over into appellate law. My first boss that I worked for, his name's David Bevans, had an appeal, and he'd never done one before, but he said, You know, I'm going to throw this at you, and let's see what we can do. The client is a good client needs help, but let's give it a shot, and we ended up winning and getting it reversed. It was an anti slap case, actually, but that's what kind of piqued my interest in appellate law. From that point on, started taking more pro bono appellate cases and kind of dipping my feet in the water. And ever since I've joined Cajun miles, that's been my bread and butter.
Tim Kowal 3:57
Now these these initial appeals that you were doing? Were they civil or were they family law?
John Sylvester 4:01
So the first one was an anti slapp civil case, and then from there, I moved into family law. And I kind of, even though I pulled myself out as a family law specialist, I do dabble, still in civil from time to time. Last year, had a civil harassment restraining order case, still doing the anti slap from time to time so, but primarily it's, at this point, strictly family law. Yeah, they're
Tim Kowal 4:24
not, not. A whole lot of a civil attorneys who dabble in family law. We usually, you know, don't put foot in that stream. But as a family law attorney, you're not, not afraid to dabble in civil law, not family law.
John Sylvester 4:39
That's right, where those crossover. I mean, the harass the restraining orders are very similar to domestic violence restraining orders that we do in our cases. And anti slap, I actually find to be pretty straightforward. I guess when it comes to the briefing aspects of it, I know that you guys find anti slight, anti slap law a lot in your line of work. Work, and it can get pretty complex in terms of the substance of it, but procedurally, it's just a two prong test, right? It should be easy
Jeff Lewis 5:08
Au contraire, it's a four prong test. Remind me to email you my thoughts on the four prong test for anti slapp law.
John Sylvester 5:14
Okay? Is that the next podcast? Yeah, exactly.
Tim Kowal 5:17
Yeah. You still got me really worried about that. Now I can't understand the four part test, and it now just frightens me. But we will have to do a podcast on that, just so I can it'll force me to get educated on it well. So tell us a little bit more about about family law appeals. You're you're familiar with both civil appeals and family law appeals. What are give us some broad strokes. What are the big differences on Family Law appeals?
John Sylvester 5:45
Well, I would say that there are probably two big hurdles in consulting on Family Law appeals, and that is that a lot of times the passage of time while an appeal is pending during a family law case can have dire consequences when you're talking about child custody cases, if you lose a child custody case when the child is, you know, being assigned to the other party to live primarily with them, and you want to appeal that ruling if you don't get it stayed, which you know is supposed to be easier to do in custody cases than in other cases, but the courts are still pretty stingy with stays. You're going to have a year and a half that passes while the child is getting older, getting more accustomed to their new home, and so even if you possibly obtain a reversal on appeal, it can be a Pyrrhic victory, because ultimately the trial court might not want to reverse that order, or at least backtrack on that order, because the child's already gotten used to their new circumstances.
Jeff Lewis 6:43
Hey, have you found that, due to that delay and prejudice from the passage of time, that those kind of orders are more readable, meaning you can seek review and obtain review by emergency writ easier? Or is that not your experience?
John Sylvester 6:57
Yeah, so the case law agrees with that. There's cases out there. Keith r versus Superior Court is a big one that we rely on that talks about the passage of time being a justification for writs in child custody cases. So the law supports that theory. In practice, though it is very difficult to as you guys know, writs are rarely granted, and in this case, they should be, but I have personally found them to still be pretty stingy, except in the most you know, abjective circumstances where there's a clear error, perhaps even a structural error, leading into our discussion today that might give rise to more of a writ approach, but I'll tell you that every time I take a custody case across My desk for an appeal. That's immediately what I'm thinking is, do we need to get an immediate stay if there's not an automatic one there already, and if not, you know, do we need to get a writ of mandate or a writ of supersedes, depending on the type of order you're appealing?
Tim Kowal 7:55
John, have you ever speaking of writs and courts being stingy about granting writs? Have you ever been denied, summarily denied a writ, or just denied a writ, and then later found that that, well, you wish you had an opportunity to go back to the Court of Appeal and say, I told you so, the very bad thing that we told you was going to happen has now happened, and the client is irreparably harmed. You know, the kid is now beyond jurisdiction. And you know, whatever, whatever it is that you had complained of was the irreparable harm in the in the court summarily denied it anyway. Have you ever had that situation in in most of my I can't think of any in my own cases, most of them are, well, yeah, probably at the time, I understand why I thought it was irreparable. But it turns out the very bad thing didn't happen. So maybe the court was was within its its rights to deny it and just put me in line for a direct appeal.
John Sylvester 8:46
Well, I wish I could say that I got that kind of vindication, but I think that vindication requires that when your writ gets denied, the client says, Let's go forward with the appeal anyway, so that you, you know, ultimately get that reversal and they agree with you, most clients, when the writ is denied in something like a move away case or a child custody case, where it's a change of custody, most clients are very, very unlikely to go forward with the remaining appeals process, even if they're still entitled to take an appeal, because they know that the fruits of that appeal are going to be lost, Returning to that idea of the Pyrrhic victory, because they may ultimately get the reversal, and the Court of Appeal might say, trial court, you now need to reassess the best interest and maybe consider changing custody of this child goes back down on the trial court, and the trial court says, I'm not changing anything. This child has gotten used to this over the last year and a half, so even though I committed an error a year and a half ago, circumstances have changed.
Tim Kowal 9:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The circumstance I'm always worried about is the appeal becoming moot. You know, like you say you take that direct appeal anyway, but you're just hoping that that doesn't become moot by the time the Court of Appeal gets around to the opinion right
John Sylvester 9:58
now that. Dovetails to the second issue I was going to mention in terms of tricky family law cases, which is things like support orders that get modified throughout the course of a case. And so if you have a client who gets a really bad spousal support order that they don't like the idea of waiting 18 months to appeal it, rather than maybe perhaps just taking it on the chin and filing a motion to modify it down the road, they're usually going to take the modification route.
Tim Kowal 10:26
Now, when, when you're Go
Jeff Lewis 10:28
ahead in the civil world, there's this concept of waiver, that if somebody appeals a judgment, but they accept the benefits of part of the judgment, let's say the monetary aspect, but they appeal other parts of the judgment or order. Sometimes you can bring a motion to dismiss based on the concept of waiver. And I was wondering in the family law context, have you run across any issues where an order or judgment comes down establishing custody or support and one of the parties accepts that the partially the result that appeals the rest, whether courts of appeal will ever find waiver there. Usually,
John Sylvester 11:01
if there's waiver, it's because it's the acceptance of a direct payment that they weren't otherwise going to get even. So like in the in the support context, you don't find waiver because if I say I want $1,000 in support, and the judge owner gives me 500 I'm allowed to keep that 500 each month while I'm trying to appeal to get the full 1000 and I think we can understand the reasoning, right? We're not going to force somebody to reject their child support checks just to prove a point on appeal. But so where we come into the waiver problem is usually when it's not a lesser sum you're accepting trying to go after the greater I see on the custody side of things, I don't think I've ever seen a case dismissed because somebody accepted the result of a custody order and started following that custody order while appealing it at the same time. Interesting. Okay,
Tim Kowal 11:53
okay, well, let's get to right to our discussion of Abdel Kader. We had mentioned John. You had mentioned statements of decision one of the many issues that trial attorneys need to be aware of, both civil trial attorneys and family law trial attorneys, the statement of decision process became front and center in the in the case of del Cade versus Abraham. That was from March of 2022 so it's it's two years later, but we're still talking about it. And in fact, there have been a couple one of the reasons we keep talking about it, John is because Jeff and I keep finding cases that that have gone the other way, or I think we found another one that had followed Abdel Kader. One of the interesting things about Abdel Kader is that it seems to part ways from a California Supreme Court decision FP Monier and one of its tenets of the statement of decision, law that says that even when the trial court omits a required finding that's required to be made in the statement of decision, that is an error, but it's not necessarily a reversible error. To be reversible, the appellant has to demonstrate that the omission was a was prejudicial, and it amounted to a miscarriage of justice, which is the constitutional standard. But before I get too far ahead of myself, let's if you could help us back up and cover a little bit of the statement of decision process as it relates to family law appeals. Why are statements of decision so important, and why was it important in the Abdel Kader case, which in which you were you were Counsel of record for the respondent, of course,
John Sylvester 13:23
and we're now two years removed from the result of this case. Otherwise it would have been a lot more angry and passionate in talking about this. I've had some time to come at it with a neutral approach. Now this
Jeff Lewis 13:35
is a safe space for you to get it all out.
John Sylvester 13:39
So statements of decision and family law come up quite a bit, because, obviously they're all bench trials. And so, you know, there's, there's a there's a slight exception involving the criminal aspects of the contempt that can come up if it's longer than six months of jail time, potentially, but that basically never comes up. And so statements of decision are something that are always available in the family law bench trials, and they're also something that we see quite a bit when it comes to evidentiary hearings on what are called requests for order in family law cases, which are just it means emotion, basically, lot of times in family I always get
Tim Kowal 14:11
myself in trouble asking, can you send me the motion? What do you mean? Motion? I have a request for order? Oh, yeah. I meant the request for order.
John Sylvester 14:18
Right, right? And you can always tell when you're talking to a family law buddy, when they're throwing the term RFO around, as if you obviously know what they mean. So those rfos, those motions that result in, you know, five day long evidentiary hearings, end up deciding pivotal issues in family law cases. And you're allowed to get your statement a decision from those because it's longer than eight hours. So those play a pivotal role in the in the decision process, because obviously the doctrine of implied findings is something that's very concerning to appellate practitioners when they're trying to preserve their rights for appeal of those cases. And it's also particularly important in family law cases, because a key thing that sets family law apart from some other. Areas of law is the number of mandatory findings in various family law statutes that require findings to be made explicitly on the record.
Tim Kowal 15:10
That's right. And one of the, one of the issues that I'm always looking at in when you're analyzing a family law ruling to determine whether it's appealable, you know, they're always going to be appealable for abuse of discretion, which is a crummy standard when you're the appellate and so one of the only ways you can you can find, you try to find a silver bullet by something like what you just mentioned, when there was a required finding to be made, or a factor that was required to be considered by the family judge. And Aha, it looks like that judge didn't even consider that factor. So I got them, we can get a reversal, if we could just expose this one error. And the way to do that, really, the only way to do that is if you have the statement of decision, you have to request a statement of decision request, request those findings be made. Because if they're not made, as you mentioned, the doctrine of implied findings kicks in, where the Court of Appeal will just assume that, well, even though the the trial judge didn't even mention it in its written ruling, didn't even hum a few bars about it, we're going to just infer that it was made in the privacy of the judge's own mind, right? So tell us about in one other question that Jeff and I talk about is, as you just mentioned, if a trial is under eight hours, then you don't have that automatic opportunity to request a statement of decision once the judge issues the tentative opinion, which is required under the rules of court. Three point, 1590 when the hearing is under eight hours, you have to have the you have to be in that state of mind, presence of mind to request orally before you submit your honor, I would like a statement of decision in those circumstances. Jeff, I would suggest, and I concur, that probably a better thing to do would be just, just an abundance of caution, file a written request for statement of decision at the outset of the hearing. Is that something that when, when your colleagues poke their head into your office and say, Hey, I've I've got a trial coming up, can you help me avoid stepping in any trap doors? Is that something you recommend?
John Sylvester 17:12
Yeah, absolutely. I used to, when I was a younger lawyer, I used to toss it into my trial brief. Actually, at the very end, some people even still try and throw it into their petition at the very beginning of the case that I want to statement a decision on anything that goes to trial or a hearing in this case, I don't think that that's a enforceable practice, nor do I did I actually find out later on that a request in your trial brief necessarily carries the day. So that's exactly correct that typically I say, Look, you know, have your written request for a statement of decision there up front, and treat it as a part of your checklist of things you must accomplish at the trial, just like you would your motions in lemony at the beginning of the year.
Tim Kowal 17:50
Yeah, yeah. I still, I haven't, I haven't seen, you know, black letter law saying that, that you can do it that way. You know, that you can make the request, a written request for statement of decision before the hearing even happens. I don't see why not, but I would still like the some confirmation of that in a in a court, published court of appeal decision somewhere at some point. So tell us about Abdel Kader. The facts of that case involved a custody dispute. In that case, there was the husband and wife had separated, and then there was a custody dispute. A husband wanted custody, but the husband had previously had a domestic violence restraining order against him, and per statute, I think it's section 3044, there is a mandatory presumption that that parent who previously had a restraining order against him was that that custody would not be in the best interest without unless that presumption was overturned. So tell us a little bit more about how the statement of decision process played in to that case and the section 3044, presumptions.
John Sylvester 18:55
Sure. Yeah. So you did have a situation where there was, you know, a finding of abuse made against the husband in that case and the father, and so it triggered this 3044, presumption. Now it is a rebuttable presumption. Want to key that word in here to our analysis, because the statute not only sets forth the presumption, which says that it's you know, essentially, you know detrimental to the best interest of the child to be placed into the joint custody of somebody who's found to have committed abuse within the last five years. And so that was certainly a presumption that he had to overcome. But the second aspect of 3044, is basically a checklist of the ways to overcome the presumption. It includes taking a domestic violence class, taking alcohol treatment courses, if assessments, if you've you know if alcohol played into it, and not violating the restraining order, not violating parts of your parole. So it basically explains to the person who's subject to this presumption here, all the things you can do to get back into the court's good graces and to demonstrate that despite your past misdeed with this act of abuse. Yes, you should still have joint custody of your children. And so in this case, the husband essentially had had that finding against him, had 3044, being applied on him, but he and his attorney had fought well to overcome the presumption. So he had actually already had joint custody of the children for a long period of time before they got to this hearing, and in essence, things had been going relatively well. I put well in quotes because it's family law, you know, it just means that, basically, there had been no further allegations of abuse. There had been no issues with the children, and by all respects, he was reformed in his conduct as a father. And so it played into this case, because the court ultimately found that although the presumption applied because there had been a finding of abuse within the last five years that he had overcome the presumption, the problem arises that the statute states that in addition to finding the over the presumption has been overcome, it has to state findings on the record reflecting each of those checklist of factors that I talked about, and basically the reasons why it's been overcome, right?
Tim Kowal 21:04
Yeah, and that that leads us to the problem in that, in that case, is that the the family judge, as you said, thought that, well, it looks like, looks like the father has been reformed. There was some, there's some check marks in the past, but looks like we're pretty clear sailing ever since, so we'll go ahead and grant custody. But then the issue on appeal was, aha, there's there these. There were require, there were required findings to rebut that presumption, and they have to be expressly stated. They weren't expressly stated. So therefore a Court of Appeal just reverse without any further consideration. And what was, what was the problem with appellant's argument?
John Sylvester 21:46
So, you know, we basically tried to attack this in two specific ways. The first thing was they had not asked for a statement of decision at the hearing, and we felt that a statement of decision would have been appropriate in this case, meaning that by not asking for it, we felt that the doctrine of implied findings should have applied in this case, and this would have been an important application to Section 3044 because even though the trial judge didn't explicitly state the 3044 findings, we felt that with the absence of a statement of decision, the court of appeal was free to imply that the court made those findings, so long as substantial evidence supported each of those findings. That was kind of argument number one. Argument number two was that even if the court did commit an error here, and we couldn't imply findings that the error was harmless following FP versus Monir. We essentially were arguing that the other side couldn't demonstrate that if this thing got sent back down on remand, and the trial court did go through the checklist of 3044, as it was supposed to, that the result was going to be any different. And that's, you know, the my colloquial retelling of what the harmless error rule is. You know, is it a reasonable probability that you would obtain a better result on reversal?
Tim Kowal 23:05
Right? So the FP moneer case was a, like, we said, a California Supreme Court decision that says that even if there are missing findings in the statement of decision, even though that's an error, it does not lead to per se reversal. Instead, the appellant has to show that there was that there was a prejudicial error. What did the what did the Court of Appeal in Abdelkader have to say about that rule from Fp moneer?
John Sylvester 23:36
Well, you won't find Fp moniere cited in the decision, so that might tell you what they had to say about that specific case. So you know, out of an abundance of caution and respect, obviously, for the for the justices who reviewed it, I'm sure that they were aware of the rule, but just in this case, they decided not to cite that. Instead, the focus was more on whether or not the doctrine of implied findings prevented the trial court from simply being able to imply these 3044, findings, or to say it another way that the Court of Appeal could find those implied findings in the absence of them being on the record. So the analysis and abdicator was light, if not completely absence, on the issue of FP versus Monier and the harmless error analysis, and more focused on the Doctorate of implied findings analysis. And their assessment was essentially that, because the statute says you must make Express findings, we're not allowed to imply those findings, even in the absence of a statement of decision, right
Tim Kowal 24:44
and now in the in the appellant's briefing, as you mentioned, when the when the when there's not a finding made, but the court has to infer that the finding was made in the absence of a request for. Given a decision, the standard of review turns to substantial evidence whether the record contains substantial evidence to support the implied finding in that case, I wonder if, if you had attacked, if the appellant had made a substantial evidence type of argument in its in its opening brief, yeah,
John Sylvester 25:18
not, not sincerely. You know, really, the chips were all put into the basket of you were supposed to make these findings. The findings say they're mandatory, so you should reverse. In fact, I was the one, as the respondents attorney, that was really making the substantial evidence argument in favor of affirming. Because my position was, you know, based on the evidence in the record, that even though the court had not followed the checklist of 3044, if you just did paint by number of clear evidence in the record, you could actually prove each one of those factors. For example, one of the factors was, have you completed a batterers intervention? Course, if one has been ordered, well, one was never ordered, so he had no course to complete. So the evidence in the record reflected that he got to skip past that element. Same thing with the alcohol assessment. And there were also findings by the court showing that the children had been doing well in his custody, which went directly towards the idea that he had proven that it would be in the best interest of the children to overcome the presumption. So our position was that there was substantial evidence in the record to support each finding if the court was willing to imply it, which obviously it was not.
Tim Kowal 26:32
Yeah. So all right, well, let's say, as we wrap up this, this first part of our conversation, we're just doing an overview of the statement of decision process and and what the Abdel Kader case did with that, with that that process, John, can you give us the upshot of what is the state of play in the family courts now after Abdel Kader?
John Sylvester 26:55
Well, I think that you know, the concern here is that we have created, perhaps the sort of the fruit of the poisonous tree of a certain line of cases, detracting from the FP versus moniers of the world, suggesting that just simply not making the findings is enough to get you what we would call structural or per se reversible error. And there was, there was an unpublished case. There was, in fact, even another case that I was involved in that was unpublished that followed AdvoCare. Much to my frustration, I had to relive the horror of that result a second time over, this time in a non published case. So maybe it didn't quite sting as much, but you know, we have seen other cases, following in support of applicator, to the extent that they are saying that simply not following the findings means you automatically get reversal on appeal. And in these cases, because, you know, I'm following them closely, you're not seeing an in depth analysis of the harmless versus structural error issue. I think that's the concern, is that either, either the briefing is not sufficient enough, or something to make them gloss over that important point.
Jeff Lewis 28:08
Let me Veer. Let me veer the conversation this totally different direction. You said you're following this issue very closely. What tech do you use to follow this issue? Or do you just happen to come across the cases
John Sylvester 28:19
well, so I go on to the Court's websites every single week. This is a part of just some of my I guess. You know, do gooder volunteer work in the community is that I'm just looking at every public every single week. Some people watch reality TV. I follow these reports come out, and I'm constantly looking for family law cases. And because this issue has become near and dear to my heart, my eyes tend to glue towards reversals, you know, where they talk about prejudicial error or affirmances, where they say it was harmless. And so just discovered these cases along the way that have either cited to Abraham or Abdul Qadar or kind of indirectly, follow its line. Yeah,
Jeff Lewis 29:01
all right. So, so you read each interview, published decisions, so maybe in part two of our interview, you'll tell us who has the better percentage of winning cases, me or Tim in the published records.
John Sylvester 29:14
It's also tricky, because there's those reverse in parts you know, which really make it tricky. You call those a W or not. Kind of depends on whether you won the meat of it. Yeah, yeah,
Tim Kowal 29:26
yeah. After Abdel Kader. And just to close us out here on the first part of our discussion about it, after Abdel Kader, the Supreme Court case FP versus Monier is still the law of the land. The absence of a required finding in a statement of decision is not, per se reversible, but you still but you also have a published court of appeal decision in Abdelkader versus Abraham that says that at least in the Family Code Section 3044, rebuttable presumption concerning custody the the a missing a. Finding to make that, to rebut that presumption is per se reversible. So that's just something to put in your hat. Now, if you want to, if you're right online with, with, with Abdel Kader, cite Abdel Kader. You probably still in in discharging your duty of candor to the court. Have to cite FP Monier, even though Abdel Kader, his opinion did not. But you know, you're probably, you're probably okay, you have a good argument there. But otherwise, going beyond that, if you have, as you mentioned, John, there are a lot of these types of statutes in the family code that have these required findings. So they so you could probably, even when you're outside section 3044 you could look at, I think, is it section 2033 that was dealt with. We'll talk about that in our next discussion. Or Family Code 2030 that also has required statutory findings. And could you cite Abdelkader on those sorts of things? We will talk about that in our next discussion, but Jeff, for now, let's let's leave it there that'll duly tease our audience to tune into our next episode where we'll continue our conversation with John Sylvester. So if you have any questions for future episodes, please email us at [email protected] and in our upcoming episodes after our continued conversation with John, look for more tips on how to lay the groundwork for an appeal when preparing for trial.
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