Visitation

Can My Child Refuse Visitation With Me?

You have your eight-year-old daughter all packed and ready for a week with her mother. You are supposed to hand her off within the hour, in compliance with the court-ordered child visitation schedule. Before she is in your car, though, she says she does not want to go to her mother’s house again. She says the house smells, and her ...

By |August 31st, 2018|

Is Malicious Mother Syndrome a Real Thing?

If you are at all embarrassed to ask your doctor for help with ... er ... bedroom issues, imagine strapping on Pulvermacher’s Galvano-Electric Chain Belt1. Weighing in at 2.2 pounds, it was a collection of needlessly complex nonsense once used to treat ED, promote digestion, and relieve rheumatism. The chain belt was hardly a discrete item for manly men of ...

By |July 11th, 2018|

Can I Take My Kids Out-of-State for Summer Vacation?

You and your ex-wife have worked out the bumps and edges of separation, divorce, and child custody. Now you are looking to summer, when the parenting time schedule you two worked out includes three whole weeks with your adorable children, June and Auguste. You are excited to have little Auguste and June for most of July, and plan to drive ...

By |May 30th, 2018|

20+ Disturbing Facts about Fatherlessness

Perhaps as a way to make ourselves feel better, humans unscientifically invented the notion of “compensation” for deficits. We tell ourselves, for instance, that blind people have more acute hearing, or that hearing-impaired people are excellent lip readers (neither of which is true, says Michigan’s Community Service Commission). Often we drape the same socially comfortable cover over fatherlessness, trying to ...

By |May 11th, 2018|

Can Text Messages Be Used as Evidence in Family Law Court?

Virginia’s laws of evidence are described and organized in great detail in the Rules of Supreme Court of Virginia (616 pages and no pictures!). Thumb through to page 95 and you get to the Good Part, the Virginia Rules of Evidence, which continue along to page 175, a tedious and tiresome 80 pages. Clearly, if the ancients wished to hide ...

By |May 4th, 2018|

Do Verbal Agreements Count for Custody & Visitation?

The character Roger “Verbal” Kint in Usual Suspects is a charade, disguising the evil genius of (spoiler alert) Keyser Söze in the same body. He is called “Verbal” because he can talk your ears off. He should, technically, be called “Oral,” but the connotation is a bit racey for the role, so Verbal it is. Verbal vs. Oral You see, ...

By |April 16th, 2018|

How Do Virginia Courts Decide Parenting Time?

Sometimes treasures hide in plain sight. What was true of Edgar Allen Poe’s Purloined Letter (you can read it courtesy of the University of Virginia)1 held true in the recent discovery of a genuine, multi-million-dollar Auguste Rodin sculpture2 sitting unrecognized for years in the Madison, New Jersey municipal building. The same is true in legal circles; important, valuable information for ...

By |April 11th, 2018|

The Broken GAL System & What We Can Do to Fix It

The New Year has brought with it many householders determined to stay on budgets, so they sit down in earnest and divvy up paychecks to be spent on housing, food, and so on. If, like Virginia’s legislators, they do this without regard to actual income and expenses, their budgets are doomed. In similar fashion, Virginia’s lawmakers often stipulate programs but do not provide ...

By |March 28th, 2018|

Do I Have to Allow Visitation As a Custodial Father?

The world record for the most people performing a headstand simultaneously is 648, say the folks at Guinness World Records1. Around our offices, we like that record, because we tend to turn the tables on a lot of Virginia custom in our pursuit of legal fairness and equity. For example, though too few Virginia men are custodial parents, those who ...

By |January 29th, 2018|
1 4 5 6 7 8 10
Go to Top