In a year in which California’s Court of Appeal has issued numerous opinions about domestic violence restraining orders, another one came out Thursday, based on a case right here in San Diego. In a unanimous decisions, three justices of Division One of the Fourth District of the Court of Appeal held that once a judge…
Assembly Bill 2344 by Tom Ammiano, the Modern Family Act, passed both the Assembly and the Senate by wide margins this summer, and was signed by the Governor and chaptered into law on September 26th. The new law makes several changes to existing law regarding important family law topics such as adoption, paternity, and issues…
This summer the state of New Jersey made a significant change to the state’s alimony laws. For decades, alimony in New Jersey was apparently typically granted as a matter of course in a divorce on a permanent basis, under the theory that marriage is a contract, and a spouse is entitled to alimony when the…
Anyone who has been through a contentious divorce case in California will tell you that one of the scariest things is the possibility of sanctions, that is, a fine — if the judge thinks that one of the parties has not been very cooperative. That’s what happened in 2012 in San Diego, when a judge…
In a recent Decision by California’s State Bar Court, which oversees discipline for all California licensed attorneys, an attorney was punished following her arrest for resisting an officer and for committing a battery on that officer. The attorney, a 52-year-old woman, was acting in an abusive manner in a number of ways, but the culminating…
Shalom Israel! That’s what a mother with custody must be saying after the California Court of Appeal this week allowed her to relocate from California to Israel with her eight-year-old son. This saga has many twists and turns that are highlighted in a 17 page opinion published Wednesday in the case of J.M. v. G.H. However, the main…
Last month a San Diego resident fell to his death during a skydiving exercise when his parachute did not deploy. The man was an experienced sky diver, and his parachute was equipped with a device that would have automatically opened the chute if the user failed to trigger it manually. Although an official manner of…
What happens if a person sees domestic violence but, for the most part, doesn’t actually physically experience it? According to a decision of the Court of Appeal, it may still count as “abuse”, allowing the person who saw what happened to get a restraining order under California’s Domestic Violence Prevention Act (DVPA). In a 3-0 decision…
The public fight over the care and conservatorship of famed radio personality and voice-over actor Casey Kasem, who died last month, has brought to the fore the legal problems family members can face when there is an internecine feud over the care of a loved one. The case has in fact prompted legislation to be…
What does it take to get a domestic violence restraining order in California? According to a recent decision by the State’s Court of Appeal, there simply needs to be “an affidavit showing past abuse”. In other words, the person seeking the restraining order does not have to additionally prove that there is a probability…
