706
Opinion of the Court
then at bar." Colorado River Water Conservation Dist., supra, at 814. Such might well be the case if a federal suit were filed prior to effectuation of a divorce, alimony, or child custody decree, and the suit depended on a determination of the status of the parties. Where, as here, the status of the domestic relationship has been determined as a matter of state law, and in any event has no bearing on the underlying torts alleged, we have no difficulty concluding that Burford abstention is inappropriate in this case.8
V
We thus conclude that the Court of Appeals erred by affirming the District Court's rulings to decline jurisdiction based on the domestic relations exception to diversity jurisdiction and to abstain under the doctrine of Younger v. Harris, supra. The exception has no place in a suit such as this one, in which a former spouse sues another on behalf of children alleged to have been abused. Because the allegations in this complaint do not request the District Court to issue a divorce, alimony, or child custody decree, we hold that the
8 Moreover, should Burford abstention be relevant in other circumstances, it may be appropriate for the court to retain jurisdiction to ensure prompt and just disposition of the matter upon the determination by the state court of the relevant issue. Cf. Kaiser Steel Corp. v. W. S. Ranch Co., 391 U. S. 593, 594 (1968).
Though he acknowledges that our earlier cases invoking the domestic relations exceptions speak in jurisdictional terms, Justice Blackmun nevertheless would reinterpret them to support a special abstention doctrine for such cases. See post, at 713-716 (opinion concurring in judgment). Yet in briefly sketching his vision of how such a doctrine might operate, Justice Blackmun offers no authoritative support for where such an abstention doctrine might be found, no principled reason why we should retroactively concoct an abstention doctrine out of whole cloth to account for federal court practice in existence for 82 years prior to the announcement of the first abstention doctrine in Railroad Comm'n of Texas v. Pullman Co., 312 U. S. 496 (1941), and no persuasive reason why articulation of such an abstention doctrine offers a sounder way of achieving the same result than our construction of the statute.
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