Family court

Family courts are specialized courts that emerged in the twentieth century to hear matters of family law, generally created as a court of equity empowered to decide and issue orders on family matters including child support. Their jurisdiction varies by place: in some systems a family court hears every case touching familial and domestic relationships, and each country, and each individual American state, structures its own system for handling such cases differently. Common matters brought before a family court include child support, divorce, child custody, spousal maintenance, guardianship disputes, and domestic violence, with the exact scope again set by the law of the particular jurisdiction.