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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 ...

Addiction: it turns the most ordinary of people into unreasoning, selfish jerks — and dealing with an addicted spouse is easily difficult enough to seriously threaten any marriage. But what exactly is addiction? More importantly, if we get a good grip on what it is, can we discern which addictions can be overcome and which should be (lovingly) walked away ...

It’s perfectly normal for a couple to get married with dreams of a happy life together. But many marriages end in divorce — the standard wisdom is that every year, 2% of all existing Michigan marriages end. But while the number of divorces has remained remarkably steady since the 80s, the reasons divorces happen have change. According to a recent ...

Many people are under the mistaken impression that getting their divorce annulled is somehow going to be faster, easier, or cheaper than getting a divorce. The fact is that every single element of a divorce that makes it a drawn-out, painful affair must still be dealt with in an annulment. There are still custody battles, martial estate division issues, and ...