Prompted by our post of yesterday about Virginia lawyer-legislators, commenter Hans Bader at his own blog nominates New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey as examples of how bad matrimonial law can get: “the more lawyers are in a state legislature, the more unfair a state’s divorce laws tend to be”. (OpenMarket.org., Jan. 2). Plus: our family law archives are here.
Posts Tagged ‘divorce’
French lawyers strike
The action was “in protest at a possible reform that could cut them out of many divorce cases.” Notaries public would be authorized to handle many divorces involving mutual consent, at a large likely savings to divorcing couples. (AP/IHT, Dec. 19).
“Solely interested in ripping the other to shreds”
A Nassau County, N.Y. judge rebukes two parents “engaged in a ‘vitriolic and venomous’ dispute over child custody and visitation.” Note that it’s not a case of divorce or its aftermath: “The couple never married.” (Vesselin Mitev, “Judge Blasts Parents for Using Court to Attack, Demean Each Other”, New York Law Journal, Oct. 24).
Divorce prying: beyond private detectives
Another object lesson in how your rights to privacy stop when litigation begins:
High-tech surveillance tactics are now commonplace in divorce cases, changing the nature of matrimonial law practice.
Soon-to-be-divorced spouses routinely steal each other’s BlackBerries and install snooping software on each other’s computers. This not only enables them to read each other’s e-mail but to monitor, in 15-second increments, what a perhaps-erring marital partner is doing on the Internet, reports the New York Times. What they can’t find out, their divorce lawyers perhaps can by hiring even more technologically sophisticated private detectives.
“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” says Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “It has completely changed our field.”
Amusingly or not, the one area where the law is ferocious in responding to adversaries’ invasions of each others’ privacy is that of clients’ communications with their lawyers — mustn’t infringe on the lawyer-client privilege, after all. (Martha Neil, “Divorce Practice Now a Surveillance War”, ABA Journal, Sept. 18).
September 18 roundup
- L.A. city council debating settlement of Tennie Pierce (firehouse dog food prank) case, apparently for several million [AP/Mercury-News; earlier]
- Lerach said to accept jail term of 2 years or less in plea deal, won’t testify against former partners [Washington Post, Point of Law; earlier]
- No shock, Sherlock: divorce cases said to have the highest rate of perjury in open court [Oregonian via WSJ law blog]
- Things you might not have known about the Duke/Nifong case unless you’ve read the new Stuart Taylor/K.C. Johnson book [Leo, Minding the Campus; Thernstrom]
- Take a wild guess as to one reason doctors are reluctant to communicate with their patients via email, despite the many potential advantages [Medical Economics via KevinMD]
- Latest suit charging casino should have recognized customer’s gambling addiction [Indianapolis Star; earlier]
- One brother kills the other in anger in the North Carolina woods, both members of a logging crew; ruled compensable under workers’ comp [Coppelman]
- My client, the dog: another trend piece on steady expansion of animal law [Boston Globe]
- Prankster gets American U. alumni mag to print erroneous report of two classmates as being gay. Defamatory? [New York Post, Smoking Gun; Julie Hilden a while back]
- Trial begins in Kentucky of civil suit arising from the string of McDonald’s strip-search hoaxes Ted wrote about last year [OnPoint News, Louisville C-J/USA Today]
- Woman who nearly froze to death after a night of drinking sues city, emergency personnel and taxi driver who dropped her at home [five years ago on Overlawyered]
Cheater’s Poetic Justice / Guestblogger Sendoff
Check out this story about a man’s alleged infidelity exposed after 1-800-FLOWERS mailed him a thank you note for flowers he purchased his girlfriend. His wife found the note, called the florist who faxed the receipt detailing the recipient.
So, she files for divorce and he sues 1-800-FLOWERS for breach of contract for revealing the relationship. Now, I don’t suppose this claim has much jury appeal–a cheat asking for money? A million dollars? His attorney frames the issue this way:
Infidelity is one of the things that would qualify as a pendulum-swinger in a divorce case. And now the wife has cold, hard evidence, and it is solely because of 1-800-FLOWERS.
It may be the florist’s fault she has the evidence but it’s “solely because of” him that he did it. So much for personal responsibility. I wonder how many taxpayer dollars will be wasted in this litigation.
My guestblogging stint here is over, and I really enjoyed it! Thank you Walter Olson! I part with this quote, a compliment to the fine attorneys I have and continue to work with:
If I have seen further [than others] it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727
July 31 roundup
- Can’t possibly be true: Tampa man sentenced to 25 years for possession of pills for which he had a legal prescription [Balko, Hit and Run]
- Plaintiff’s lawyers “viewed [Sen. Fred Thompson] as someone we could work with” and gave to his campaigns, but they can’t be pleased by his kind words for Texas malpractice-suit curbs [Washington Post, Lattman; disclaimer]
- Pace U. student arrested on hate crime charges after desecrating Koran stolen from college [Newsday; Volokh, more; Hitchens]
- Little-used Rhode Island law allows married person to act as spouse’s attorney, which certainly has brought complications to the divorce of Daniel and Denise Chaput from Pawtucket [Providence Journal]
- Lott v. Levitt defamation suit kinda-sorta settles, it looks like [Adler @ Volokh]
- Trial lawyer Mikal Watts not bowling ’em over yet in expected challenge to Texas Sen. Cornyn [Rothenberg, Roll Call, sub-only via Lopez @ NRO]
- Frankly collusive: after Minnesota car crash, parents arrange to have their injured son sue them for negligence [OnPoint News]
- Canadian bar hot and bothered over Maclean’s cover story slamming profession’s ethics [Macleans blog]
- Five Democratic candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson) auditioned at the trial lawyers’ convention earlier this month in Chicago [NYSun]
- Donald Boudreaux’s theory as to why Prohibition ended when it did [Pittsburgh Trib-Rev via Murray @ NRO]
- Speaker of Alaska house discusses recent strengthening of that state’s longstanding loser-pays law [new at Point of Law]
No-fault laws boost divorce rate by 10 percent?
So contends a new literature survey from the social-conservative Institute on Marriage and Public Policy (Douglas W. Allen and Maggie Gallagher, “Does Divorce Law Affect the Divorce Rate? A Review of Empirical Research, 1995-2006“, PDF, requires registration; “Split Decisions” (interview with Maggie Gallagher), Newsweek, May 23). New York, among the few states to have retained fault-based divorce laws, is considering a move to no-fault.
By reader acclaim: “Man Sues Over Gay Marriage Question On Bar Exam”
Stephen Dunne, 30, flunked the Massachusetts bar exam and now says it was because he refused on principle to answer an exam question concerning the rights of two married lesbians, their children and property. He claims the hypothetical, which concludes with the question “What are the rights of Mary and Jane?”, violated his First Amendment rights and served as a “screening device” to exclude persons like himself who disapprove on religious grounds of the state’s gay marriage law. “But Boston attorney Tom Dacey doesn’t believe the case will go very far. … ‘Lawyers have to answer questions about legal principles they disagree with all the time, and that doesn’t mean we’re endorsing them,’ said Dacey, a director of Goulston & Storrs’ litigation group. ‘You might be somebody who is morally opposed to divorce, but have to interpret the divorce laws of the commonwealth to answer a question about who property is passed to.'” (Donna Goodison, “Bar-exam flunker sues: Wannabe rejects gay-wed question, law”, Boston Herald, Jul. 6 and sidebar; AP/TheBostonChannel.com, Jul. 6).
P.S. He wants $9.75 million. And On Point News has a copy of the complaint (PDF). Update: Now he wants less, reports Above the Law (Jul. 13).
Large Payment Awarded After 30 Years of Divorce
British businessman Dennis North’s wife Jean left him 30 years ago after she began seeing another man. Their split became official in 1981, when they signed an agreement that granted Jean their house and income from rents on their various properties.
North went on to be a wildly successful businessman, while his ex-wife never worked. However, a judge has just ordered North to pay Jean a large lump-sum payment because she has “fallen on hard times” due to a number of money-losing investments:
Mr North, 70, has been ordered by a court to hand her another £202,000.
The order follows a series of big-money divorce cases which have swung the law against husbands and resulted in huge payments to ex-wives even after short childless marriages. The North case now threatens to make husbands pay large sums even decades after a split.
…
Existing English law gives ex-spouses who are receiving maintenance payments the ability to request a lump-sum payment instead. Jean’s attorneys believe she is entitled to this money, and state their case by responding to the odd “cherry” reference:
But Deborah Bangay, QC, for Mrs North, said: “This was not a second bite at the cherry but it is what are her reasonable needs. The court was entitled to take into account the obvious wealth of the former husband.”
She said it was not Mrs North’s fault that her investments had gone wrong. The district judge’s award had been at the “bottom end of the spectrum”.
So, to recap: This woman destroys her marriage, never gets a job, lives well beyond her means, loses a ton of money in bad investments, then gets a large cash payment for her trouble? Think there’s a line of people willing to be her investment advisor?