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 placed in institutional care, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010) indicates that some Of 285,000 children leaving in 2008, only 52% were able to reunite with their parents or primary guardians. While the ASFA also has statutory guidelines designed to reduce the amount of time it takes courts to decide permanent custody of children who have been removed from their parents, children who exited foster care in 2008 spent on average 21.8 months in state custody (Department of Health and Human Services). These findings create several questions for researchers, two of which are pertinent to the present study: 1) What factors influence the reunification of children with their families; and 2) What factors influence the timeliness with which reunification occurs? Previous research has attempted to answer these questions by focusing on demographic information such as age, race, parent and child education (e.g., Courtney, 1994; Wulczyn, 2004), and income (e.g., Courtnety, 2004; Eamon, 2002). ; family composition such as single-parent homes and the number of adults in the home (e.g., Davis, Landsverk, Newton, & Ganger, 1996; Harris & Courtney, 2003). One caveat to these tests is that many of them take into account factors such as 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 caveat by examining one process factor: the involvement of parents and their legal representatives in the initial decision, but... halfway through the paper... fathers were not involved (Malm et al. al. , 2008). Children whose nonresident fathers were highly 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 prior research examining father involvement in services and case plan development, there remains a paucity of research regarding the influence of father involvement in legal proceedings on addiction outcomes. Although some analysts (such as Edwards, 2009) suggest that including the father in a dependency proceeding can lead to favorable outcomes for the child, including relative placement instead of foster care and possibly avoiding out-of-home placement altogether, these suggestions are not been accepted. been tested empirically. This study examines the association between father involvement in legal proceedings and reunification.