You asked (1) whether states that passed laws authorizing judges to order educational support beyond high school have seen an increase in the amount and cost of litigation as a result and (2) for a summary of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision finding its law unconstitutional.

SUMMARY

We found no state with a post-majority educational support law that keeps track of this information. Court officials we contacted in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, and Massachusetts stated that they are not aware of any specific caseload problems associated with the passage of these laws. In addition, Stephanie Walton, Policy Associate for the National Conference of State Legislatures' Children and Families Program, who has been tracking all states' post-majority support laws, indicated that no problems have come to her attention.

We also conducted a Westlaw computer search and reviewed reported decisions involving post-majority support from courts in six states to determine the volume of appellate court activity. The results are summarized in Table 1 below and show a range of three (Hawaii) to 15 (Illinois) cases.

Also below is a summary of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's opinion declaring that state's college support law unconstitutional. A copy of the opinion is enclosed.

REPORTED COURT DECISIONS

We analyzed appellate court decisions from Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Massachusetts, states that have post-majority educational support laws. Table One shows the number of appeals involving challenges to orders imposed on non-consenting parents and, of these, the number in which post-majority support was one of several legal issued raised. It also shows, by state, the year in which the first reported appellate court decision issued.

The table does not include post-majority support cases in which the challenge involved the terms of a negotiated support agreement, as those disputes are independent of a state's authority to impose support obligations on parents.

Table 1: Appeals Involving Post-Majority Support Obligations

PENNSYLVANIA CASE: CURTIS V. KLINE

In 1992, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled that parents had no duty to support their adult offspring in college because no law required it (Blue v. Blue, 522 Pa. 521 (1992)). Shortly thereafter, the state legislature passed a law permitting courts to order either or both separated, divorced, or unmarried parents to provide equitably for the educational costs of their children beyond age 18 (22 Pa. C. S. § 4327(a)). Philip Kline, who was ordered to pay educational support for two of his offspring attending college under the new law, filed a court action to end this obligation. Among other things, Kline argued that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U. S. Constitution.

A majority of the justices of Pennsylvania's Supreme Court agreed (Curtis v. Kline, 542 Pa. 249 (1995)). They first determined that the law classified two groups of young adults in need of funds for post-secondary education: those whose parents divorced, separated, or never married and those from intact families. Because this classification does not involve fundamental constitutional rights or target a suspect group (as race-based classifications do), the court used the deferential "rational basis test. " Under that test, state actions are upheld so long as they are rationally related to a legitimate state interest.

Next, they concluded that there was no rational basis for the state to provide only certain needy college students, i. e. , those from non-intact families, the legal means to overcome the unwillingness of their parents to support them beyond age 18. They expressly rejected the reasoning of New Hampshire's Supreme Court, which had found a similar statute did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of its state constitution (LeClair v. LeClair, 137 N. H. 213 (1993)). The New Hampshire court had reasoned that it was permissible for the state to protect children of divorced parents from being unjustly deprived of opportunities they would otherwise have had if their parents have not divorced.

Dissent

Two justices dissented in Curtis. Like their brethren in New Hampshire, they found it constitutionally permissible for the state to intervene to keep the children of divorce in the same position they would have been in had their parents' relationship remained intact. In their view, a post-majority support law does not place a premium on the rights of these children while devaluing the same rights for children from intact marriages. It merely recognizes that, in general, divorce has a deleterious effect on children for which the state can constitutionally provide a remedy.

The dissent noted that other states addressing the constitutionality of post-majority support orders uniformly have held that the Equal Protection Clause is not violated by this attempt to equalize the disparate situation faced by children of divorce. Those courts have adopted two approaches, both reaching the same result: (1) the difference between married and divorced parents establishes the necessity to discriminate between the classes or (2) judge-made law finds an extended dependency period justified for children from non-intact families (Curtis, pp. 260-268).

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