Articles

Constitutional Rights in Family Law

We’re all used to the idea that, by virtue of the Constitution, we have these certain, unalienable rights. And it’s true – we do. But the reality of what those rights are, and what they mean, and how and when they apply is a little bit more complicated.  In a lot of ways, family court...

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Do family law lawyers make conflict worse?

I was recently reading a book (that I mentioned in the articles I shared with you on Monday and Wednesday of this week as well), where the author, Greg Ellis, alleged that, in his high conflict divorce and custody case spanning over 5 years and costing in excess of a million dollars, family law attorneys...

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Why do women initiate Virginia divorce first?

Statistically speaking, women file divorce first. In roughly two thirds of divorce cases, women file first. When the woman in question is college educated, that number jumps up to 90%. That’s a lot of divorces, right? Meanwhile, their bumbling husbands report feeling surprised – after all, they thought everything was ‘just fine’. I’ve written on...

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Does it matter who files first in Virginia divorce or custody? I was recently reading a book, “The Respondent”, about a dad who faced a divorce and ongoing custody battle in California, allegedly as a result of the lies his wife told about his relationship with his two young boys. I have a lot of...

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  There’s a lot of Latin in the law and, what with it being a dead language and all, there are very few people who speak or understand Latin, beyond the obvious ‘habeas corpus’ stuff. It’s kind of interesting how often we come up against Latin terms and phrases to describe things in the law;...

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Blending Families After Divorce

There are very few easy situations when it comes to custody, visitation, child support, and blended families. It seems to me that, even in the cases that proceed fairly smoothly (or, at least, without litigation), there’s a fair amount of heartache and difficulty. I’ve said it before, but I think it bears mentioning again. A...

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No one wants to pay spousal support. No one. No man, no woman, no one, wants to pay money each month to help support and maintain their ex partner. It used to be that only men could be required to pay support to their ex-wives. It wasn’t sexist, either, because in previous decades, women didn’t...

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Facing a complicated legal issue is really scary, especially when you’ve started to do the research and you realize that it’s looking worse than you maybe even expected. Then, you check your bank account balance and, well, it looks even worse. We’ve talked before about how lawyers, or at least family lawyers, typically work on...

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