How Siblings Affect Custody

 Posted on August 09, 2014 in Child Custody

In divorces that involve children, the parents’ paramount questions are often related to custody and include concerns such as how custody is determined or the various types of custody. One common issue that arises when determining the answers to these concerns involves how siblings affect the custody process in general. Siblings’ relationships with each other can often be very close, and the existence of these additional close relationships may complicate the custody process.

Generally, there are two major concerns related to siblings and custody. These include whether the court will keep the siblings together and whether siblings are allowed visitation rights to the other siblings. Unfortunately, neither question has a concrete answer. Family law is a discipline with many unique scenarios. However, there are legal guidelines within which courts will work.

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New Study Finds Possible Explanation for Gender Imbalance in Divorce

 Posted on August 05, 2014 in Divorce

A past post on this blog highlighted the disparate impact that divorce has on girls because marriages with firstborn daughters tend to end more frequently than marriages with firstborn sons. That post highlighted a study that posed a variety of sociological explanations for that gender gap, such as fathers feeling more obliged to provide a male role model for sons or parents’ inaccurate perceptions that girls are more costly to raise increasing stress within the marriage.

Now, a new study has discovered a possible biological explanation for the gender imbalance in divorce. This explanation is known as the female survival advantage. The female survival advantage is a term for the generally-observed fact that women appear to be more physically resilient and more likely to survive than men. This trait carries over throughout all stages of life. In fact, men have documented higher mortality rates for all ages from zero to 100.

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New Spousal Support Guidelines Await Governor's Signature

 Posted on July 30, 2014 in Wheaton Divorce Attorney

One of the key portions of any divorce proceeding is the determination of spousal support, also referred to as alimony. This is the money that one former spouse pays to the other to support them as they transition back to their single life. The current system of calculating spousal support is based on a wide array of factors, including things like both spouses' incomes and property, the spouses' needs and earning capacities, the standard of living that occurred during the marriage, and the duration of the marriage. This has led to spousal support amounts being somewhat unpredictable at times.

Now, a new bill that is currently awaiting the governor's signature plans to reform that. The bill will not remove those factors from play entirely, but it will provide more concrete guidelines for judges to follow. The bill adds a new method of calculating support terms and the amount of time that the supporting spouse will be required to pay support, which will now be based on the length of the marriage. Additionally, the bill provides more strict mathematical formulas for calculating the amount of spousal support that a person will owe.

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Illinois Marriage Law, Same-Sex Marriage, & Out-of-State Residents

 Posted on July 24, 2014 in Same Sex Marriage in Illinois

On November 20, 2013, the Governor of Illinois signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage in Illinois, and that law went into effect on June 1, 2014. This new right to same-sex marriage has attracted many people from out of state seeking to get married in Illinois because their home states do not yet recognize same-sex marriage.

However, an old Illinois law, Section 217 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, may prevent the marriages from being legitimate. The law voids marriages in Illinois if they take place between people who live in a state that would not, itself, recognize their marriage. This means that a marriage between a same-sex couple, whose home state did not allow same-sex marriage, would be void.

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Middle Aged Divorce Can Lead to Happier Marriages Later

 Posted on July 21, 2014 in Divorce

A pioneer longitudinal study has recently revealed that people who end troubled marriages when they are middle aged, colloquially referred to as “silver splitters” or “grey divorcees,” can often find later marriages to be much happier. The study in question, the "Grant Study," tracked young men over their whole lives, starting in the 1930s. The study, which focused in part on relationships, recorded whether the participant got a divorce, how long the participant’s marriage lasted, whether the person remarried, and the qualitative happiness of the marriages using periodic survey questions.

The Grant Study

The Grant Study, formally known as the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, began in 1938, when researchers started tracking the lives of then 19-year-old Harvard students. The study began with 268 participants, but only 242 remained following World War II, in which many of the men fought. The researchers required participants to answer periodic surveys about their families and their relationships, usually annually or every other year. This allowed the researchers to track marriage length and marital status.

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Wage Garnishments and Child Support

 Posted on July 19, 2014 in Child Support

Even after going through the entire divorce in court and getting a divorce decree finalized, the process may not be over. The aftermath of a divorce involves a variety of practical issues, among them collecting child support. While many parents readily keep up to date on their support obligations every month, some require legal enforcement or collection activities before they pay their court-ordered sum. One such method of legal enforcement is to use a wage garnishment, also known in Illinois as a wage deduction order. This is a type of court order that pulls the child support payment directly from the supporting parent’s wages without letting it get into their hands.

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A New Kind of Infidelity

 Posted on July 15, 2014 in Divorce

People commonly treat their finances as a personal, private matter, and not something to be discussed with others. However, that changes once they enter a marriage. Couples join their lives together during a marriage, and that includes joining their finances. They have to share bank accounts, take on debt together, and make purchases for the marriage as a unit. Not every couple does so successfully though. Instead, some spouses end up being financially unfaithful.

A recent survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education discovered that one out of every three adults who have been in a relationship with combined finances admits to lying about money. Some people even lied about such basic topics as the amount of debt they owe or the amount of income they earn. Seventy-six percent of people who responded to the survey also said that when dishonesty about money occurred, it had an effect on the relationship. It even ended in divorce in 16 percent of cases.

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Frozen Embryos during the Divorce

 Posted on July 11, 2014 in Divorce

The law often cannot keep up with rapid changes in modern technology. This can lead to legal gray areas and open questions in the law. One recent example of this involves advances in reproductive technology. These advances have made the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) more common. This type of treatment involves extracting sperm and egg cells from the couple and creating embryos from them in a lab. Doctors then implant some of these embryos in the woman, and the rest are often frozen in case the couple chooses to use them at a later date. These frozen embryos can present challenging questions in the context of divorce, a topic that Illinois courts have only recently begun to address, starting with the case of Szafranski v. Dunston. This case is an example of a significant divorce issue, which arises when the wife would like to keep the embryos for future implantation, while the husband would prefer to have them destroyed.

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Tax Status and Divorce

 Posted on July 08, 2014 in Divorce

Filing taxes can be a complicated endeavor at the best of times, and doing it during a divorce only serves to make it more difficult. This is because many parts of a person’s taxes depend on marital status and family relationships. Those sorts of relationships can affect things like tax brackets, deductions, and tax credits.

Two of the largest issues that a divorce presents in regards to taxes are marital status and dependent deductions. Marital status, which includes categories like single, married, or head of household, alters a person’s tax bracket and it can raise or lower their standard deduction. Dependents, which refers to people relying on the tax filer for care, allow the filer to claim them for the purposes of tax deductions.

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The First Amendment Right to Infidelity?

 Posted on July 02, 2014 in Divorce

A handful of states, including Illinois, still recognize a pair of torts that allow spouses to sue their unfaithful partner's lovers in certain circumstances. These torts, alienation of affection and criminal conversation, were recently the subject of a judicial opinion in North Carolina, where the trial court judge ruled that they were unconstitutional under the First Amendment's protection of freedom of expression. While such a ruling would have no actual legal effect in Illinois, courts do often look to other jurisdictions for persuasive legal reasoning, and the opinion provides a modern view on some very old laws that still affect people today

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