The Chaos in Child Support Decisions in Cases of Joint Physical Custody: Critique of the Caselaw and of the Shifman Committee's Report

Abstract

This paper examines child support in situations of shared physical custody, from the perspective of the existing law and the ideal law. This issue is part of a public debate following the Shifman Committee's recommendations, which also include replacing the rule of personal-religious law over child support with territorial uniform civil law.

Caselaw had concluded that shared physical custody entailing equal time spent with each parent, leads to reduction of 25% of the common level of support. There have been lot of variations and deviations from this principle in recent years. We identify three schools in the caselaw, led by the district courts of Te-Aviv, Haifa, and Center. We present and criticize these three schools in our paper.

The second part of the paper presents the Shifman Committee Report's conclusions and proposed formula, and points to some of what we view as its faults, primarily in cases of shared physical custody. We end by proposing a more suitable approach, acknowledging the developing trend of awarding shared physical custody even in cases of high conflict.

Keywords: family law, child support, Israel, Jewish law, civil law, gender