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Are questions about traveling while under various forms of specific legal disabilities acceptable for this site? Legal disabilities can include:

  • Criminal justice supervised release, including probation, parole, house arrest, furlough, electronic monitoring, etc.
  • Civil guardianship
  • Outpatient civil commitment / Community Treatment Orders (CTO), etc.
  • Sex offender registration requirements

Example hypothetical questions:

  • I am on State Probation in Florida for a felony. What form do I need to fill out to request permission to take a one week trip to Georgia?
  • I have legal guardianship of my adult child in Germany. Does he need my permission to travel to the Netherlands? May the permission be oral or does it need to be in writing?
  • My psychiatrist told me that a person subject to a Community Treatment Order (CTO) under the UK's Mental Health Act 2007 may not travel more than 50 km from their home without permission from the Mental Health Review Tribunal. Is this correct?
  • I am required to register as a sex offender in the US and live in Oklahoma. I am visiting Texas for two weeks. How many days do I have to register with Texas police before I am in violation of registration requirements?

This is not a duplicate of Are legal issues on-topic? as that question is about a question asking about travel related fraud, not legal travel restrictions.

I recognize Zack Lipton observation that the be-all-and-end-all answer to many of these questions is going to be "contact your probation officer/social worker/judge/lawyer/whoever is responsible for the legal disabilities", but that doesn't mean that no answer could be provided here - an answer might look like,

In Florida, your probation officer legally has the final say on out-of-state travel, but the standard procedure is to submit Form FDLE-334 to your probation officer at least three weeks in advance of travel, and official State guidelines provide that probation officers should routinely "approve all travel within 100 miles of the state line and/or to places where the probationer has known family unless the officer has clear and convincing evidence either that the probationer intends to commit a felony during such travel or that the proposed itinerary fails to disclose material facts surrounding the probationer's actual plans".

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    They seem more on-topic than "how flimsy an excuse can I use to justify a free upgrade to business class"-type questions, which I'm beginning to think need their own tag.
    – MadHatter
    Commented Aug 6, 2018 at 6:41

2 Answers 2

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I think these are all pretty fair questions.

I'd want to be careful about encouraging questions surrounding illegal activity. Want to know how to evade a travel restriction? We're not the forum for that. Want to know what travel you can do while maintaining your legal restrictions? Sure, that seems reasonable to me, as long as the restrictions aren't super-targeted to that individual and are something that might reasonably be seen in the wild again.

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    I agree (we have a past discussion on questions about illegal activity). Most of these are about legal activities though. Personally, there's no way in hell I would answer that last one, as the consequences of getting it wrong could be catastrophic to the individual involved, and many of these sample questions boil down to "contact your probation officer/social worker/judge/lawyer/whoever is responsible for the legal disabilities."
    – Zach Lipton
    Commented Aug 4, 2018 at 2:29
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I think they'd be fascinating and very valid questions. We have had questions about intentionally getting deported from the US, revoked visas, and more.

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