Abstract
Awarding joint or sole custody is of crucial importance for the lives of both the child and the parents. This paper first models the factors explaining a court’s decision to grant child custody and later tests the predictive capacity of the proposed model. We conducted an empirical study using data from 1,884 court rulings, identifying and labeling factual elements, legal principles, and other relevant information. We developed a neural network model that includes eight factual findings, such as the relationship between the parents and their economic resources, the child’s opinion, and the psychological report on the type of custody. We performed a temporal validation using cases later in time than those in the training sample for prediction. Our system predicted the court’s decisions with an accuracy exceeding 85%. We obtained easy-to-apply decision rules with the decision tree technique. The paper contributes by identifying the factors that best predict joint custody, which is useful for parents, lawyers, and prosecutors. Parents would do well to know these findings before venturing into a courtroom.
Highlights
The most recent data in the US accounted for 2,015,603 marriages and 746,971 divorces annually [1], while in Europe, there were 1,950,935 marriages and 834,068 divorces [2]
Joint custody is likely to be beneficial to children on average, which justifies recommending it [4], the economic repercussions are not negligible and some parents fight for custody to avoid paying child support [5]
The final value of Results Factual elements and legal principals associated with each court decision Table 3 provides an overview of the summary statistics for each independent variable for the two groups of court sentences according to the judge’s decision
Summary
The most recent data in the US accounted for 2,015,603 marriages and 746,971 divorces annually [1], while in Europe, there were 1,950,935 marriages and 834,068 divorces [2]. Joint physical custody is increasingly common in many Western societies. This is a parental care arrangement in which a child lives with each parent 25–50% of the time [3]. Joint custody is likely to be beneficial to children on average, which justifies recommending it [4], the economic repercussions are not negligible and some parents fight for custody to avoid paying child support [5]. Before engaging in expensive litigation, it would be good for parents to have an idea of how likely it is that they will win the lawsuit. Our paper aims to identify the factual elements that determine a court’s decision to choose joint or sole custody, relate them to the legal principles applied in the judgments, and develop a predictive model capable of forecasting judicial decisions from a set of factual findings
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