Art. 5091.1.Appointment of Attorney In Disavowal Actions

A disavowal action is a family-law proceeding in which a husband disputes that he is the legal father of a child born, or conceived, during the marriage, seeking to rebut the presumption of paternity Louisiana law otherwise attaches to a child born within a marriage. The child's own status, the question of who counts as the child's father, sits at the center of that dispute, yet the child is not the one bringing or defending the case.

Article 5091.1 answers that gap by giving the child an independent voice. In any disavowal action, the judge appoints an attorney specifically to represent the child, distinct from the attorneys representing the husband and the mother. That attorney owes duties to the child alone and represents no other party in the litigation, a conflict-of-interest safeguard built directly into the text of the article.

This is one of two named, specialized applications of Article 5091's general attorney-appointment mechanism found in this Chapter. Where Article 5091 supplies the Code-wide rule for appointing an attorney to represent an unrepresented defendant, Article 5091.1 adapts that mechanism to a proceeding where a child, who cannot represent themselves and is not formally a party, has a direct stake in the outcome.