Category: General

It’s gotten to be an epidemic: every time some legislator decides he (and most of them tend to be men, by the way) wants to change people’s behavior in divorce, he persuades a number of equally ignorant men in the legislature (and most of them tend to be men, by the way) to require EVERY divorcing couple to file some new document, or pay some new fee, or prove some new fact. The latest is an effort by Rep. Danny Carroll in the Iowa legislature to require every divorcing couple with children to file a written parenting plan within 30 days after filing for divorce. Here’s the story from The Iowa Channel.

Continue reading “A Stupid, Stupid Idea”

A California judge has ruled unconstitutional a new statute that allowed entire divorce cases to be sealed and thus unavailable to the public. Here’s the story from the Los Angeles Business Journal. Gov. Schwarzenegger had signed the statute into law as “emergency legislation in June in response to complaints about identity theft from divorce filings.

In the ruling, Superiof Court Judge Roy Paul called the statute “overbroad.” It would have allowed an entire case file to be sealed even if it contained only one line of sensitive information.

China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs says the number of divorces there increased 21% betrween 2003 and 2004. More than 1.6 million couples divorced in China last year, despite a continuing stigma attached to divorce.

Here’s the story from Entertainment.news.designerz.com. The stigma attached to divorce seems to be waning in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and China implemented a simplification to the process of divorce in 2003.

Great theater (or we should say “theatre”) in London today. Three protesters dressed as Batman, Robin, and Captain America (why is it the Brits can’t come up with their own superheroes?) climbed up the Foreign Office Building and stood atop a narrow ledge near the home of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Here’s a story on the spectacle from MSNBC and Reuters.

The three protesters from a group called Fathers 4 Justice unfurled a banner reading “Access Denied – Don’t let Labour stop you being a Superdad.” They did not breach security in their protest.

Here’s a nice article on mandated equal time parenting from the Arizona Family Law Blog. The article describes and then criticizes a movement by fathers’ rights groups to have every state legislature mandate a presumption that equal time parenting is best for children of divorce.
Continue reading “Mandating Equal Time Parenting?”

My new friend Grant Griffiths in Cloud County, Kansas has just launched a new family law blog. Here’s Grant’s blog, which will focus on Kansas and national family law issues. Welcome, Grant!

Here’s a nice article in the Fresno Bee about a combined effort of 20 churches in the Fresno area to implement a “Community Marriage Policy.”

The idea is to encourage engaged couples to have a courtship of at least a year and to meet four times with a trained, married couple. The churches hope this will reduce the number of couples who marry and then divorce.

Continue reading “A Doomed Community Marriage Policy”

Here’s a nice follow-up article from the Tyler Morning Telegraph about the tragic shooting on Thursday of a mother and her son over child support.

The report by staff writer Megan Middleton makes it clear without saying so that the shooter was abusing his ex-wife over an extended period of time. Then the report includes what for me is the most haunting statement, this from the mother’s long-time lawyer. I wish I could share this statement with every person whose spouse or lover is abusing them:

“I don’t think she ever feared for her life or ever thought him capable of doing anything like this,” [the divorce lawyer] said. “It seemed like he had a problem with emotion and a problem with becoming overly emotional when intoxicated. I think most of the altercations came up late in the day or late in the evening, and alcohol was involved.”

And the other question I’ll keep wondering about, even though nobody in Texas seems to be, is what’s wrong with a system that allows a man with a history of domestic violence to get his hands on an AK-47 and a flak jacket? I don’t know why, but questions like that just rattle around in my head.

Here’s an opinion from the Illinois court of appeals that tries to wrestle with what happens when a woman changes her sex and becomes a man (“Sterling”), marries a woman (“Jennifer”), and becomes a father to a child. In the Case of Simmons v. Simmons, Case Nos. 1-03-2284 and 1-03-2348 (Consolidated), 2005 Ill. App. 127 (February 16, 2005), Jennifer argued in the custody fight that the marriage in which she was participated was void because Sterling was not a man (he still has some female sex organs).

The Court of Appeals accepted the trial court’s judgment that the marriage was void and that Sterling was not a man. Sterling was left with visitation rights.

Here’s a nice article on Top Financial Divorce Mistakes from Forbes.com.

Here are some of the mistakes the author, Leah Hoffman, names:

Having unrealistic expectations

Not communicating (with your spouse and your lawyer)

Getting into an endless battle

Getting hung up on the numbers (for example, believing that the financial split must be exactly equal)

Focusing on the present and not on the future

Forgetting to account for taxes

Overlooking important information (for example, about retirement plans, assets, and (I would add) all the debts and who owes them)

Staying too entangled financially with your ex-spouse

Failing to allow time for a dormant career to get back on track

It’s a nice list.

We Americans paid 18 percent more more child support and alimony in 2002 than we did in 1997, even after adjustment for inflation. Here’s a report on it from United Press International as it appeared in the World Peace Herald.

The story indicates the changes that occurred over the five year period:

Total payments increased from $34 billion to $40 billion

People paying increased from 7.2 million to 7.8 million

The average annual payment increased from $4,700 to $5,200

84 percent of those paying child support were men. Half of the payers were younger than 40, and half were 40 or older.

A man donned a bulletproof vest, picked up his AK-47 assault rifle, and started killing people in Tyler Texas yesterday, apparently angry about a recent ruling about his back child support. Here’s a report about it on KXXV 25. Here’s another report from the Longview News-Journal.

The dead include the man, David Hernandez Arroyo, his ex-wife Maribel Estrada, and a bystander who tried to help her. Arroyo also wounded the couple’s adult son.

The divorced parents were due court as part of their child support dispute. Arroyo opened fire as his ex-wife and son were entering the courtroom and then fled in his pickup truck with deputies’ bullets bouncing off his body armor. They eventually were able to shoot him in the head and kill him.

Watch for this soon at a community center near you. The Albury Community Legal Service in Australia is running regular workshops to help people prepare their own divorce documents. Albury is a small city about midway between Melbourne and Sydney, in New South Wales.

The participants from the workshop are filing about 15 percent of the divorces in Albury County Court. Here’s the story about the program from the The Border Mail.

WLKY Channel 32 in Louisville has run a report on Collaborative Divorce, a process in which the husband and wife attempt to work out their differences outside the courtroom. The report, which aired last night, quotes divorce lawyer Billy Hoge:

“Litigation’s tough,” Hoge said. “It’s hard on people. It’s very expensive. It’s very entrenching. It makes people take positions and sometimes those positions are not in their best interest. I call collaborative law, very simply, enlightened self-interest.”

Continue reading “Collaborative Divorce”

When the judge in a New Jersey court released the lawyer from a long and complex divorce case (it had been under way for nine years), it was not improper for the judge to order that the lawyer return the entire $10,000 retainer the client had paid him when the case began.

The appellate court ruling came in the case of Fischer v. Fischer, Case No. A-5093-03T3, Sup. Ct. N.J. February 22, 2005. The appellate court said that the trial court acted properly in disregarding the time the lawyer had invested in the case and focusing instead on the irregularities in the retainer agreement, including a clause describing half the retainer as nonrefundable.
Continue reading “The Divorce Lawyers Aren’t Going to Like This . . .”

If you care about making child support work better, you need to read this thoughtful commentary from Tonyaa Weathersbee on BlackAmericaWeb.com. Citing research from the Urban Institute finding that more than 70 percent of back child support is owed by men making $10,000 per year or less, she processes it this way:

Of course, one obvious lesson here is that men, especially those with low incomes, shouldn’t make children that they aren’t going to be able to care for. But the fact that aggressive child support enforcement hasn’t stopped poor men from making babies says a lot. It says that you have black men who are struggling to prove themselves in a society that devalues them. It says that they, like many of the black women whom they impregnate, prove themselves through having children. It tells me that poor black men and women want what the rest of the society has, regardless of whether their dreams are supported by the social and economic infrastructure that surrounds them.

Continue reading “Is Child Support Enforcement Working?”

The director of the California County that has improved its child support collection the most says the culture of fatherhood needs to change. Here’s the story about his statement from KGET.

Kern County, California took in more than $67 million in child support payments in 2004. But child support chief John Nilon said that, unless something changes, young men will continue to father children in Kern County (and presumably elsewhere) with no way to support them. Here’s a quote from the story:

“We have 3,000 cases where the fathers are 18 or less, and they owe us $18 million,” said Nilon. “We have got to stop the philosophy of young men today who somehow think it’s a badge of honor to father a child and not be responsible for them.”

Nilon said he is working on a teen pregnancy intervention program aimed directly at high school boys.

Peronal bankruptcy rates in Michigan hit a record high in 2004, up 2.3 percent from 2003 and nearly 40 percent higher than the rate from just three years ago. Here’s a story on it from the Detroit News. And here’s another from the Detroit Free Press.

Continue reading “Bankruptcies Hit Record in Michigan”

New York has long been an unusually expensive place to divorce (and I believe it has an artificially low divorce rate), because the state is one of the last states to do away with the requirement of finding fault. You may remember from a few days ago that New York Court of Appeals Chief Judge Judith Kaye called for no fault divorce in New York.

Now here’s Channel 7 Eyewitness News (WABC) signing in with its version of the story.

Continue reading “Reducing Cost of Divorce in New York?”