Part one of an eight-part series.

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In 2013, a Maryland custody dispute did something rare. It made law.

The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland issued a reported opinion in Reichert v. Hornbeck, No. 0213, September Term 2012. The case arose from the divorce of Jeffrey Reichert and Sarah Hornbeck — both attorneys — following an eighteen-month marriage and the birth of their son, G.R., in 2009. Reichert appealed the Circuit Court for Baltimore City’s divorce judgment, raising six questions covering child support calculations, custody, tax exemptions, property division, alimony, and attorney’s fees.

The appellate court’s opinion was designated for reporting under Maryland Rule 8-605.1, which requires the Appellate Court to publish opinions of “substantial interest as precedents.” It entered the official body of Maryland jurisprudence — citable, teachable, part of the public legal record.

That was twelve years ago. The case did not end there. It barely began.

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What Came Next

Between 2019 and 2026, the same underlying dispute between Jeffrey Reichert and Sarah Hornbeck generated litigation in the Circuit Courts for Baltimore City, Anne Arundel County, and Baltimore County; in the District Courts for Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County; in the Circuit Court for Chesapeake, Virginia; and in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. It produced a body attachment, multiple bench warrants, a psychological evaluation, a custody evaluator, a Best Interest Attorney for the child, reunification therapy, a $100,000 attorney’s fees award, and ultimately the complete termination of Reichert’s in-person access to G.R.

It also produced five separate appeals to the Appellate Court of Maryland and one petition to the Supreme Court of Maryland.

Each of the five appellate proceedings produced a written opinion.

Not one was published.

Every opinion — addressing questions of Maryland family law that arise in courtrooms across the state every week — was designated unreported. Each resolved questions with implications far beyond this case. None of them can be cited as precedent. And in five appeals spanning six years, no Rule 8-605.1(b) request to designate any of them for publication was ever filed. Jeffrey Reichert confirmed this directly; a review of the appellate dockets for all five proceedings finds no such filing in the public record.

That is what this series is about.

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What “Unreported” Actually Means

Most people who encounter the family court system never think carefully about the reported/unreported distinction. It sounds administrative — a classification made somewhere downstream, a filing category with no practical consequence for the family sitting in front of the judge.

It has enormous practical consequences. Just not for them. For everyone who comes after them.

A reported opinion becomes a binding or persuasive authority in Maryland courts. It can be cited by any party in any proceeding. Courts are expected to engage with it. Future litigants benefit from it without ever knowing this case existed. It is public law — reasoning the judicial system has made available to the people it governs.

An unreported opinion resolves the dispute in front of the court. That is all. For years, under Maryland Rule 1-104, an unreported opinion could not be cited in any Maryland court proceeding for any purpose. A 2023 rule amendment softened that prohibition: unreported opinions may now be cited “for persuasive value only” if the citation conforms to specific procedural requirements. But persuasive authority in a jurisdiction with binding authority on related questions is weak currency. It carries a built-in disclaimer. It signals to the next court: this reasoning exists, but you are not bound by it.

The rule governing which category an opinion falls into is Maryland Rule 8-605.1. Its full operative text is a single sentence:

The Appellate Court shall designate for reporting only those opinions that are of substantial interest as precedents.

That is the entire standard. The court decides. The decision is unreviewable. There is no public explanation of why one opinion merits publication, and another does not. And under Rule 8-605.1(b), there is one safety valve: any party may request, before the mandate issues, that an unreported opinion be redesignated for publication. Once the mandate issues, the window closes permanently.

In five appeals spanning six years, across questions that will recur in Maryland courtrooms for years to come, that window was never used. Not once. By either party. In any of the five appeals.

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The Scope of What Was Lost

The five unreported opinions in Reichert v. Hornbeck addressed, collectively:

• The standard of proof required to obtain a protective order under Maryland’s amended domestic violence statute;
• The legal framework for emergency pendente lite custody modifications involving parental alienation and interstate relocation;
• The line between high-conflict parenting and statutory mental abuse of a child;
• The application of collateral estoppel between protective order proceedings and custody cases;
• The standards governing court-appointed custody evaluators;
• How child support is calculated when a payor’s income far exceeds the guidelines;
• How attorney’s fees are assessed when serial contempt has transformed a routine modification into years of multi-jurisdictional enforcement litigation;
• The venue rules governing where protective order proceedings must be heard when a custody case is pending in another county;
• The adequacy of DSS investigations in protective order hearings; and
• Whether a court may invoke Maryland’s mandatory child abuse statute during a contempt proceeding.

These are not exotic edge cases. They are the recurring architecture of contested family law in Maryland. Judges face them. Attorneys advise clients on them. Families are bound by the outcomes.

In Reichert v. Hornbeck, the answers given to all of them are invisible.

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A System Working As Designed — and a Reason to Ask Why

It is important to be precise about what we are and are not arguing.

Maryland Rule 8-605.1 was not violated. The Appellate Court of Maryland has unreviewable discretion to determine what is “of substantial interest as precedents,” and nothing in the rule requires publication of any particular category of opinion. Unreported opinions serve legitimate purposes: they allow courts to resolve fact-specific disputes efficiently without expanding the body of precedent with rulings too tied to unique circumstances to be broadly useful.

We are not arguing that every opinion should be published. We are arguing something more specific: that these five opinions, in this case, on these questions, should have been — and that the failure to publish them is not an anomaly but a symptom of a structural problem in how Maryland decides what law the public gets to see.

Family law is the area of the law that most directly affects the most people. Custody disputes, protective orders, child support, parental rights — these touch lives in ways that commercial litigation and even most criminal cases do not. And yet family law is, consistently, the area of Maryland appellate practice that produces the least published precedent. The cases with the highest individual stakes generate the lowest institutional visibility.

The paradox is not accidental. It is, at least in part, a product of the publication standard itself — a single sentence granting unreviewable discretion, with no mechanism for public scrutiny of how that discretion is exercised, and a safety valve that in this case was never used at all.

Reichert v. Hornbeck did not create this problem. But five unreported opinions in a single case, on questions that will arise again and again, make the problem impossible to ignore.

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Next: “The Standard Nobody Published: Maryland’s Amended Protective Order Law, Eight Years Without a Reported Case.”

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All source documents referenced in this series are available through the Maryland Judiciary Case Search at casesearch.courts.state.md.us. The Appellate Court of Maryland was asked for comment on the publication designations discussed in this series. No response was received prior to publication. Riptide Investigations is an independent publication covering the structure, transparency, and accountability of Maryland’s court system.