Legal Question in Family Law in California

It is all just semantics, but it would make no sense to say one parent has sole legal and physical custody with 50% visitation. That is actually sole legal and joint physical custody with equally divided custodial time. Any difference between "custody" and "visitation" has long ago lost any legal meaning. It's all just a matter of whether legal decision making is joint or shared, and how much custodial time each parent has. The only exception is where a parent is under some serious restrictions on contact with the child such that they really ONLY get short-term visits, such as supervised visitation for a few hours at a time. But then you would never be talking about 50%.

I don't know about anyone else, but I really wish the Courts would insist on consistent verbiage. I have seen orders where it states that mom has sole physical custody subject to dad's visitation schedule. I may not be a genius, but that doesn't seem like sole physical custody when the other party has unmonitored visitation on a regular schedule. It just seems to make it horribly confusing. Recently I found myself caught in a heated argument between exes. She had only monitored visitation. When I put "sole physical custody", mom was upset. She wanted to change it to say dad had "primary custody" instead. A big argument ensued, even though the judge and both counsel tried to assure everyone that it made no difference. I think I would have been more upset that my visitation was monitored, rather than the verbiage, but that's just me, I guess!