The Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act

The recent publicity given the new federal child support enforce ment statutes has obscured the fact that a ubiquitous state-enacted statute, the Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act (URESA), remains the basic statutory mechanism for enforcing spousal and child support orders on an interstate basis. Current limitations on the funding for the federal provisions, continuing libertarian complaints regarding the potential loss of privacy in the use of federal data to locate absent parents, and the pronounced tilt toward welfare recipients, make the federal statute much less effec tive than it might be. By contrast, URESA or a parallel statute is now on the books in all fifty states plus Guam, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. New York, while not enacting the text of the uniform act, appears to be happy with a predecessor statute, the Uniform Support of Dependents Law, which is virtually indistin guishable from URESA and which suffices for reciprocity purposes in all other jurisdictions. Originally promulgated in 1950, significantly amended in 1958, and most recently revised in 1968 (the 1968 version was such a sub stantial change that the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws dubbed it the 4 4Revised Uniform Reciprocal