Posted on March 14, 2013 in Family Law

A UK newspaper reported a story about surprisingly intense reactions to grandparents keeping in contact with their grandchildren after a divorce. Even though this story is not domestic news, issues regarding divorce in first world countries remain more or less the same.

According to the Telegraph, police in the UK are being called to investigate cases where grandparents are approaching their grandchildren with postcards or presents as harassment. Grandparents often find themselves cut off by the parent who has the custody of a child, but it looks like things are getting worse. In some cases the elderly have been forced to hand over DNA samples or fingerprints, and some have even been threatened with arrest or called to a police station after sending a card or a present to their grandchildren. Some of the grandparents feel they have been humiliated for having to talk to officers regarding something like this.

If the custodial parent unreasonably denies visitation for a grandparent or a sibling, it is possible to petition for visitation. There are criteria for the petition, out of which one must be met. Examples of these criteria are: the parent that is related to the grandparent is mentally incompetent, dead or incarcerated; the parent related to the grandparent has lost parental rights by judicial act; the child is illegitimate and the parents are not living together. These are only a few of the criteria for such petition. For more information, contact an experienced divorce attorney.

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 Posted on March 12, 2013 in Personal Injury

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 Posted on March 09, 2013 in Personal Injury

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 Posted on March 09, 2013 in Family Law

It’s not easy to determine just how many Americans are being unfaithful in a marriage, primarily due to the necessary secrecy that an affair requires. Yet according to menstuff.org, an impressive 22 percent of married men “have strayed at least once during their married lives,” compared with 14 percent of women. Younger people are more likely to cheat, and younger married women more likely to cheat than young married men. The vast majority of partners did not know about the cheating—which is why, most likely, many relationships in which either one or both partners were cheating ended in divorce. According to the Associated Press and reported by menstuff.org, 17 percent of divorces in the U.S. are caused by infidelity.

And yet what does cheating, or infidelity, really mean? Does looking at another person and desiring him or her count as cheating? Do moves actually have to be made? University of Michigan Research Assistant Professor Daniel Kruger set out to determine just that, and earlier this year published a cheating survey, in which he looked at how people define infidelity, according to the Huffington Post. Just over 450 college students were surveyed, and were asked to “look at 27 different behaviors and assign them a number on a scale of 0 to 100 based on the extent to which they believed the action would be considered cheating in a long-term relationship,” according to the Huffington Post.

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 Posted on March 06, 2013 in Personal Injury

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 Posted on March 03, 2013 in Personal Injury

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 Posted on March 02, 2013 in Family Law

The number of divorces in America dropped because of the recession, according to a recent article in the Washington Post. “With housing values depressed and jobs disappearing, divorce has become a luxury beyond the reach of some couples,” according to the Post. Divorce is expensive, and many estranged couples are choosing to stay together rather than weather the economic storm. Many couples, according to the Post, are going through a separation while still living together, and are unable to move forward.

This can result in all sorts of new tensions for divorcing couples in addition to the traditional tensions divorce has always spawned. As the Washington Post asks, “How do they start over if debt is all that’s left to divide?” The number of divorcing couples that went through bankruptcy rose since 2008, as the number of divorces decreased.

According to U.S. Census Bureau’s National Marriage Project and the Washington Post, “divorce rates showed a decline in 2008, the first year of the recession, when 838,000 cases were granted at a time when growing economic strain might have produced a spike in divorce.” In 1960, there were 9.2 divorces in the U.S. per 1,000 married women 15 and older. In 2008, there were only 16.9, despite the overall rise in percentage of divorced couples and massive spike of divorces during the 1980s and 1990s. Analysts suggest this is due to the economic downturn.

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 Posted on February 28, 2013 in Personal Injury

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 Posted on February 28, 2013 in Family Law

In Portland, Oregon, the attorneys for the father of a missing boy, Kyron Horman, have asked the court for a delay in the divorce proceedings from the boy’s stepmother, Terri Moulton Horman.

Kaine Horman filed for divorce from Terri in June 2010, less than a month after his 7-year-old son vanished from him Portland school. There have not been any arrests made related to Kyron’s disappearance, but Kaine Horman and Kyron’s biological mother believe that Terri Horman knows what happened to the boy.

After the most recent hearing, Kaine said that he wanted the delay to allow the criminal investifation to proceed without any interference and to protect with 4-year-old daughter.

Kaine Horman told The Oregonian, “We’re doing the absolute best we can. She puts a smile on our faces every day.”

One attorney on the case questioned how the court could decide what the best interest of the couple’s daughter was without first knowing whether or now Terri Horman was responsible for Kyron’s disappearance.

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 Posted on February 25, 2013 in Personal Injury

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