Mandamus in Family, Probate & Civil Court

State courts, state remedies, state deadlines

A family court has held a matter under advisement for a year. A clerk refuses to accept a petition. A probate judge will not act on an executor who has stopped filing accountings. A school district ignores the timetable its own regulations set. These are the most common mandamus problems people actually have, and they share one feature that determines everything else about them: the respondent is a state or local officer.

That fact removes the federal statute from the case. 28 U.S.C. § 1361 grants district courts jurisdiction over actions in the nature of mandamus against an officer or employee of the United States, and a state judge, a county clerk, a guardianship court or a school board is none of those things. Nor do the domestic-relations and probate exceptions leave much room for a federal forum on the underlying subject: Ankenbrandt v. Richards, 504 U.S. 689 (1992), and Marshall v. Marshall, 547 U.S. 293 (2006), describe those limits. The working vehicles are state ones — Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 1085, N.Y. C.P.L.R. art. 78, Tex. R. App. P. 52 and their equivalents — and they carry the state's own limitation periods. The substantive line is the same one that governs everywhere else, and it matters most here: a court may be compelled to rule, never to rule a particular way. A custody decision, a support amount and an accounting dispute are not reachable by writ. The clearest wins in this section are the narrowest ones — a clerk who refuses to docket a paper presented in proper form is refusing a ministerial act, and that refusal is exactly what the writ was built for.

General state procedure, including the California, New York, Texas and Ohio systems in their own right, is in State Practice. Federal benefit agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs are federal respondents and belong to Agencies & Administrative Law. The elements and the ministerial-duty test are in Foundations.