Can a couple be considered to be “living separate and apart” if they continue to reside in the same home? That is the question currently before the California Supreme Court in the case of In re Marriage of Davis. It sometimes happens that one or both spouses consider the marriage over and wish to divorce,…
California uses a computer formula to calculate child support. The formula takes into account each parent’s income, the number of children involved, and the percentage of time each parent has with the child or children. The income is usually based on what the parent actually earns, but divorce courts have authority to impute income to…
In California divorce cases, the person without custody of the children (assuming there are children) usually has to pay child support. And if the difference in income between the parents or the spouses is significant, the high earner has to pay spousal support, commonly referred to as alimony. But what happens if a person isn’t…
After a divorce, parents may no longer both live in the school district where the children were attending school before the divorce. In most cases, it may seem advantageous to keep the children in the same school to maintain stability, but there may be equally convincing reasons why now would be a good time for…
Is a 51 year old woman who is a registered sex offender and who was sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor under 16 and three counts of oral copulation of a minor under 18 entitled to spousal support? Yes, said California’s Court…
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…
