This post is the fourth in a four-part series examining Utah courts’ reliance on guardians ad litem (GALs), private guardians ad litem (PGALs), and custody evaluators, and the legal, procedural, and institutional implications of that reliance.
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Blogs 1 through 3 traced a progression: why Utah courts rely on best-interest professionals; where that reliance falters and breaks down legally (and why); and how ordinary evidentiary principles already provide a path back to judicial fact-finding without synthetic substitutes. This final post addresses a different question—one that is less doctrinal than institutional: why meaningful scrutiny of these practices is so often resisted, deferred, or avoided altogether.
The answer does not lie in bad faith or individual malice. It lies in incentives, dependencies, and habits that quietly shape how child custody adjudication is carried out.
The professional disincentive to challenge the system
For attorneys, challenging the work of best-interest professionals is rarely rewarded. Such challenges consume time and increase cost, and courts often signal—explicitly or implicitly—that they are unwelcome. Objections grounded in process and evidentiary rigor risk being reframed as tactical complaints (rather than as principled objections), particularly when they implicate professionals the court relies upon heavily.
The result is predictable. Many lawyers learn to work around evaluator recommendations rather than confront them directly. Scrutiny gives way to accommodation—not because the objections lack merit, but because the professional cost of pressing them is high and the likelihood of success uncertain.
Over time, this dynamic normalizes deference. What begins as strategic restraint becomes habitual acceptance.
Judicial dependence and institutional protectiveness
Courts, too, operate under real constraints. Child custody cases are demanding, fact-intensive, and emotionally charged, and best-interest professionals—including GALs, PGALs, and custody evaluators—offer a mechanism, however imperfect, for managing that burden. Once reliance on that mechanism becomes routine, it acquires institutional weight.
When a custody evaluator’s methodology is shown to lack scientific rigor—untethered from defined methods, unsupported by verifiable data, or incapable of meaningful testing—the consequence is not merely professional embarrassment, but the collapse of an evaluative foundation on which the court has relied.
A parallel disruption occurs when a GAL’s or PGAL’s investigative work is exposed as incomplete, unrecorded, or analytically thin.
In either case, the court loses a trusty—if not wholly trustworthy—intermediary and must reassume adjudicative labor it had effectively delegated: resolving factual disputes, assessing credibility, and engaging directly with admissible evidence rather than relying on synthesized conclusions.
Over time, this dynamic tends to cultivate institutional protectiveness toward best-interest professionals and a corresponding resistance to rigorous scrutiny—not because examination is unwarranted, but because its systemic consequences are tangible. Scrutiny does not merely challenge an individual professional; it destabilizes a structure on which the court has come to depend.
“Trust the process” as a substitute for scrutiny
Parents and counsel are often told—explicitly or implicitly—to trust the process. That reassurance is offered as a form of comfort and closure. But it also serves another function: it discourages inquiry into how decisions are actually made.
When processes are opaque, trust becomes a substitute for verification. When questioning is framed as hostility, scrutiny becomes suspect. Over time, this rhetoric normalizes non-reviewability as a feature rather than a flaw.
A system that cannot tolerate questioning of its evidentiary foundations has not earned trust; it has substituted dependence on trust for the discipline that earns it.
The appellate vacuum
One might expect appellate review to correct these dynamics. In practice, it rarely does. Child custody cases often resolve through settlement or discretionary rulings that receive deferential review. Records are thin. Findings rest on synthesis rather than preserved testimony. Issues of evidentiary sufficiency are difficult to isolate and harder still to reverse.
As a result, appellate courts seldom reach the merits of how best-interest professionals function within the fact-finding process. The absence of appellate correction then reinforces the status quo—not because it reflects settled law or sound practice, but because the underlying mechanisms are insulated from meaningful review.
Mediocrity, opacity, and the absence of differentiation
In an environment where methods are unrecorded, source material is undisclosed, and reasoning is often presented in conclusory and/or synthesized form, the court lacks the means to evaluate how and why conclusions were reached. Without a record capable of scrutiny, it becomes impossible to distinguish careful analysis from assumption, or conclusions grounded in evidence from those driven by habit, intuition, or conventional wisdom. The problem is not that quality varies, but that the system obscures the criteria by which quality could be assessed at all.
This is not a condemnation of individuals. It is an observation about systems. When evaluation is fettered or outright impossible, differentiation disappears. And when differentiation disappears, mediocrity persists unchecked.
At some point, repeated disregard for basic professional norms stops looking like error and starts looking like endorsement.
Why this matters
Child custody decisions are among the most consequential determinations courts make. They shape children’s lives, parental relationships, and family structures for years, sometimes decades. Decisions of that magnitude demand processes capable of producing reliable, reviewable knowledge.
This series has not argued for abandoning expert insight, silencing children, or litigating child custody cases as though they are no different from commercial disputes. It has argued for something far more modest and far more fundamental: that adjudication must rest on evidence that can be examined, tested, and trusted.
When courts rely on synthesis that cannot be reviewed and tested, they do not merely risk error. They undermine the very mechanisms that give judicial decisions their legitimacy.
Why Evidentiary Rigor Still Matters—Obviously
The question facing Utah child custody courts is not whether the current system is familiar, convenient, or well-intentioned. It is whether it is compatible with the basic requirements of sound adjudication. If the answer is no, the solution is not reinvention. It is restoration.
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