As Liz Gooch reports in the New York Times, in a piece titled ”Malaysian Custody Dispute Lost Between Courts,” Malaysia has a two-tier judicial system, with Islamic Shariahcourts handling family law disputes involving Muslim families and secular civil courts hearing non-Muslim cases. this leads to jurisdictional conflict when families include both Muslim and non-Muslim members, or in cases in which one party converts to Islam (sometimes for strategic reasons). Gooch’s story describes a recent decision in which the civil court overruled the custody judgment of a Shariah court in such a case.