The Full Faith and Credit Clause of the US Constitution guarantees that a judicial proceeding administered in one state shall be honored by another state. In the world of guardianship and conservatorship, it’s more complicated than that. If an Oregon court appoints daughter to be conservator for mom, so that daughter can manage mom’s financial resources to pay for mom’s care, and one of mom’s financial resources is real estate in California, daughter’s authority as conservator is insufficient to sell the California real estate. Similarly, if an Oregon court appoints dad to be guardian for mentally ill adult son, and son catches a bus to Nevada, the Nevada police may not respond to the guardian’s request for assistance when dad shows them guardianship documentation from an Oregon court.

In these examples, the Oregon-appointed guardian or conservator requires temporary authority in a different state. The conservator requires California authority long-enough to sell California real estate. The guardian needs Nevada authority long enough to get son back to Oregon.  Most states, including Oregon and its neighbors, have adopted a version of a Uniform Adult Guardianship and Protective Proceedings Jurisdiction Act. These states have established a way to register the Oregon guardianship or conservatorship in the other state. Once registration has occurred, the Oregon guardian or conservator can exercise her authority in the other state.

Registration in California, for example, requires the Oregon guardian or conservator to give notice of the intent to register the case in California to a specific group of people and to the Oregon court. The form of the notice is specific and found in California law. If you use the wrong form, or if you fill out the form incorrectly, California won’t register the case. After waiting through a fifteen day notice period, California will register specific, court-certified documents from the Oregon case and assign a California case number to the Oregon case. At that point, the Oregon conservator can sell mom’s California real estate. 

The fifteen day notice period may be a bigger problem for the Oregon guardian who is trying to retrieve his son from Nevada. If the guardian is forced to wait fifteen days until he can register the guardianship in Nevada, son could just keep traveling and be gone by the end of the notice period. The uniform law doesn’t give the Oregon guardian any emergency measures to take in Nevada.  The Oregon guardian would either have to hope that Nevada authorities would respect the guardian’s authority without requiring Nevada registration, or petition for emergency temporary guardianship authority in Nevada.

If the need for guardianship or conservatorship authority in another state is long-term and probably permanent, not temporary, the states that have adopted a version of the Uniform Adult Guardianship and Protective Proceedings Jurisdiction Act have a process for transferring guardianship or conservatorship from one state to another. One objective of the process is to avoid having to repeat the process of getting a guardian and conservator appointed. One state has already seen fit to appoint the guardian or conservator. In accordance with the Constitution, the other state need not second-guess that decision, and should abide by it. 

While the transfer process avoids the costly, sometimes adversarial and time-consuming process of getting a guardian and conservator appointed, the transfer process itself is costly and time-consuming. If mom is the guardian for adult son, and she decides that they are going to move from Oregon to Washington, she needs her Oregon elder law attorney to petition the Oregon court for an order to preliminarily approving the transfer. When the Oregon order is in place, mom needs her Washington elder law attorney (if her Oregon attorney is not licensed to practice in Washington), to petition the Washington court for an order preliminarily accepting the transfer. After Washington provides that order, mom needs to ask the Oregon court for an order confirming the transfer to Washington. Finally, mom needs to petition the Washington court to finalize Washington acceptance of the case. This process involves two steps in two courts, each in a different state, each step requiring attorney assistance and taking long periods of time, including notice periods and weeks waiting for courts to sign orders (four of them in all).

The Full Faith and Credit Clause of the US Constitution is short and simple and its message is clear: on order granted in the court of one state is valid in other states. Elder law takes that clear message and complicates it, such that people considering guardianship must add interstate issues to the factors which influence their decision.