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Whether you and your ex-spouse came to an amicable agreement pertaining to child custody and child support or the courts had to intervene and make the decisions for you, the difficulties of permanent separation may not end with the enactment of the child custody order. Despite the legal split, parents will still have to deal with each other, possibly for ...

When it comes to divorce and related concerns like child custody and child support, just for example, many couples would prefer to avoid the cost and aggravation of going to court and allowing a judge to determine the course of their life. However, emotions can run high in such cases, making it nearly impossible for couples to come to an ...

One of the greatest changes in family court norms over the past 50 years has been a strong move to reduce sexual discrimination. Judges are broadly pressured to treat men and women as equal partners, with particularly pernicious issues like child custody being dealt with by changes in statutory law, such as the proposed house bill that would make shared ...

In Part I, we talked about the written legal guidelines that all courts — including family courts — followed, including statutory laws and common laws (a.k.a. precedents). Now, it’s time to talk about one of the aspects of divorce law (and all law, really) that doesn’t get a lot of airtime: legal norms. Legal Norms As opposed to the laws, ...

When we describe how divorce works, by necessity (as we are, in fact attorneys), we describe the processes in terms of what the law says and what it means for our clients. But the truth is that our very system of law is rooted in a massive series of assumptions and routines that aren’t actually written into lawbooks anywhere, but ...

Almost everyone who is getting a divorce goes through one of two sets of processes, both legally and psychologically, that have very different outcomes. Let’s look at those two in the broadest sense, and why it matters which one your lawyer believes is likely to apply. Opening Interrogations At the beginning, each person talks to their own lawyer about their ...

While it’s not anything like a scientific study, we here at Gucciardo Family Law have worked closely with our fair share of Marriage, Family, and Child Therapists (MFCTs), and we’ve asked them a lot of questions about their experiences with married couples. One of the things we weren’t at all surprised to learn is that women tend to wait a ...

When you decide something is “yours” — or “ours,” if you’re happily married — a funny thing happens. Whether consciously or not, you start to treat that object as though it is worth more than an identical object that doesn’t belong to you. Psychologists call this the endowment effect, and they’ve proved in it dozens if not hundreds of studies. ...

Child custody battles are among the most emotionally fraught parts of any parent’s life, much less “just” the divorce process. But like every court case, there’s more people involved than just you, and in many cases, the other spouse is just as emotionally invested if not moreso than you are — and the child may be anywhere on the spectrum ...

Can a rapist get himself named as the legal father of your child? Not anymore. Up until about a year ago, however, they totally could. The law didn’t explicitly allow someone who had committed rape (or any other sexual assault that resulted in conception) to pursue the status of legal father — but didn’t stop them until after they had ...