4.10.1 Jurisdiction and Venue

Jurisdiction is proper in any court empowered to hear family or juvenile matters.1  But where both District Court and Family Court operate concurrently, the Family Court has exclusive subject-matter jurisdiction over all actions brought by a current or former intimate partner under either the Domestic Abuse Assistance Act or the Protection from Dating Violence Act.2

For cases involving abuse of a child, actions may be brought in family court under the DAAA or in juvenile court under La. Ch.C. art. 1564, et seq. The fact that the abuse was originally alleged in a Petition for Protection from Abuse under the DAAA does not prevent a juvenile court from exercising jurisdiction over a Children’s Code petition based on the same allegations of fact, so long as the DAAA case was not adjudicated on the merits and is no longer pending.3

Venue is proper in any of the following parishes:        

• Parish of household or marital domicile
• Parish where petitioner or defendant resides
• Parish where abuse occurs
• Parish where divorce or annulment action could be brought (domicile of petitioner or defendant or last matrimonial domicile).

• 1La. R.S. 46:2133(A).
• 2Wellborn v. 19th Jud. Dist. Ct., 07-1087, p. 10 (La. 1/16/08), 974 So. 2d 1, 7. But see Raborn v. Raborn 2013-1211 (La. App. 1 Cir. 11/13/14), 2014 WL 5878933, at *3–4 (even though family courts are vested with exclusive jurisdiction for DAAA actions, La. R.S. 9:575 explicitly vests district courts with subject matter jurisdiction if those injunctions relate to a parent or grandparent being abused by an adult child or adult grandchild); Succession of Crute v. Crute, 2016-0836, p. 10 (La. App. 1 Cir. 8/30/17), 226 So. 3d 1161, 1170 (district court did not err by consolidating family court divorce action into previously existing succession case, where issues of fact and law related and consolidation done by consent).
• 3State in Int. of C.D., 2018-0834, p. 8 (La. App. 4 Cir. 12/19/18), 262 So. 3d 929, 933.