There are too many children in foster care. Despite federal legislation (i.e., the Adoption and Safe Family Act [ASFA], among other legislative directives) designed to reduce the number of children in care, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010) indicates that of the 285,000 children discharged in 2008, only 52 percent were reunited with their parents or primary caregivers. Although ASFA also has statutory guidelines intended to reduce the time it takes for courts to decide the permanent placement of children who have been removed from their parents, children who left foster care in 2008 spent an average of 21.8 months in state custody (U.S. Department of Education). Health and social services). These results raise several questions for researchers, two of which are relevant to the present study: 1) What factors influence children's reunification with their families; and 2) What factors influence how quickly reunification occurs? Previous research has attempted to answer these questions by focusing on demographic information such as age, race, parental and child education (e.g., Courtney, 1994; Wulczyn, 2004), and income ( for example, Courtnety, 2004; family composition, such as single-parent households and the number of adults in the household (e.g., Davis, Landsverk, Newton, & Ganger, 1996; Harris & Courtney, 2003). A caveat to these reviews is that many of them examine factors such as, for example, race, family composition, poverty; they did not focus on the processes and/or structures of the juvenile dependency justice system itself. The present study attempts to overcome this reservation by examining a process factor: the involvement of parents and their respective legal representatives during the first decisions...... middle of document ...... fathers were not not involved (Malm et al., 2008). Children whose nonresident fathers were heavily involved also spent less time in foster care (21.4 months) than children whose nonresident fathers were not involved (25.3 months) (Malm et al.). Despite previous research examining father involvement in services and case plan development, there remains little research regarding the influence of father involvement in court proceedings on addiction outcomes . Although some analysts (such as Edwards, 2009) suggest that including the father in dependency proceedings may lead to favorable outcomes for the child, including relative placement as opposed to foster care and possibly avoiding out-of-home placement altogether. of the family home, these suggestions were not taken into account. been tested empirically. This study examines the association between father involvement in legal proceedings and reunification.