Abbott v. Abbott

Abbott v. Abbott
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued January 12, 2010 Decided May 17, 2010
Full case name	Timothy Mark Cameron Abbott, Petitioner v. Jacquelyn Vaye Abbott
Docket no.	08-645
Citations	560 U.S. 1 (more) 130 S. Ct. 1983; 176 L. Ed. 2d 789
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	495 F. Supp. 2d 635 (W.D. Tex. 2007); affirmed, 542 F.3d 1081 (5th Cir. 2008); cert. granted, 557 U.S. 933 (2009).
Procedural	Writ of certiorari to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Holding
A parent's ne exeat right is a right to custody under Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and the International Child Abduction Remedies Act.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Antonin Scalia Anthony Kennedy · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer Samuel Alito · Sonia Sotomayor
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Ginsburg, Alito, Sotomayor
Dissent	Stevens, joined by Thomas, Breyer
Laws applied
42 U.S.C. § 11601 et seq.

Abbott v. Abbott, 560 U.S. 1 (2010), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that a parent's ne exeat right (in this case: the right to prevent a child to leave the country) is a "right to custody" under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and the US International Child Abduction Remedies Act.^[1] The child thus should have been returned to Chile, the country of "habitual residence" because the mother violated the ne exeat right of the father when taking the child to the United States without the father's consent.