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So you’ve just been handed your divorce decree, and you’re once again on your own. Your spouse has been the breadwinner for the past several years, and your work experience pre-marriage was decent, but no longer immediately relevant. How do you get a job when your experience is too old to count? This is the dilemma that faces thousands of ...

This question came up over a lunch with some associates: if someone is going through a very rough divorce, and their spouse is obviously acting out of spite and malice and with zero empathy, should the two attempt to use counseling to make the divorce process less horrible? The answer to this question is pretty obviously yes, so the question ...

It’s a pretty common understanding among those of us who watch shows like Law & Order or read about corporate lawsuits: when there’s a big court case and neither side is ‘The State of XYZ,’ the side that loses the case pays the court costs for the side that won. Of course, that understanding isn’t terribly correct — the American ...

Last week, we started a long list of what exactly marriage does for U.S. Citizens; this week, we’re going to finish that up — and point out why it matters. Native Americans and Marriage There is a unique relationship between the Federal government, the citizens of the United States, and the peoples of the various tribes of Native Americans. An ...

Marriage — to some, it’s an agreement; to others, it’s a religious ceremony with civil implications. To the government, ‘marriage ‘ is an enormous convenience; it’s a way to package up a huge number of what would otherwise be a huge number of legally tedious individual contracts and turn them into a single piece of paper: the marriage certificate.  What ...

The court system is designed on the precept that information on all possible proceedings be available to anyone seeking it. This applies to almost every piece of personal information that comes up in a court case (unless you are a public figure, then more complex rules apply). This means that if you get a divorce, you are potentially exposing quite ...

When a child’s parents divorce, they are left with an obligation — not just moral, but legal as well — to care for that child. The law recognizes that obligation and enforces it in a few ways, including parenting schedules and of course the financial obligation of child support. And while most often, a parent is at least nominally willing ...

Most often, when we think of divorce, we think of younger couples — no older than, say, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. But the fact is that marriages can and do come apart at any time, at any age. It doesn’t matter if you were married at 66 and divorced at 72, or married at 17 and divorced at 77 ...

When a child’s parents divorce, barring exceptional circumstances, the courts give them the opportunity to create a visitation schedule that works with their particular lives and circumstances. But some parents are simply unable to get through that process — for those parents, the court will most often order a generic, standardized custody visitation schedule. This can happen because: Either parent ...

In today’s massively tech-enabled world, it seems like it would be trivially easy to find proof that your spouse is cheating on you — and, in fact, it is trivially easy. Anyone willing to spend a hundred bucks can purchase a motion-activated camera, a device that snaps into your landline and records everything, and much more. The problem isn’t that ...