Opland v. Kiesgan,__Mich App__(1999), No. 201258 (March 5, 1999)
Domestic Relations ReviewPlaintiff appeals trial court grant of summary disposition to defendant in a paternity suit.
Plaintiff (Opland) has been trying to establish paternity of her daughter. Opland was married, but separated, when she gave birth to daughter Stephanie in 1990. She soon filed for divorce and asserted that Stephanie was her husband's (Craft) child. A year later she filed a paternity suit against defendant, and the trial court held that she did not have standing to do so under the Paternity Act, MCL 722.711, because there had been no prior court determination that Stephanie was not the child of Opland and Craft. This original paternity action was dismissed.
After this Opland and Craft entered a consent order modifying the original divorce judgment, stipulating that there was no way that Craft was in fact Stephanie's father. Opland then brought a second paternity suit against defendant, and the trial court granted summary disposition, claiming the substantive facts had not changed since the prior action. The Court of Appeals found that while she did not originally have standing to file a paternity suit, she "properly went back to the divorce court for a determination that Stephanie was not an issue of the marriage in order to remove the impediment to standing identified by our Court's previous decision." The trial court also precluded the second suit under the principle of judicial estoppel, a decision the Court of Appeals rejects. "In the absence of any inconsistent rulings and applying the judicial estoppel doctrine with caution, we decline to apply it to this case." Reversed.
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