J.P. Morgan is said to have uttered the flippant and famous quip, “If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.” That was easy for him to say; he was a robber baron, paid almost no tax (ever), and lived in a time (the 19th and early 20th centuries) when Virginians had lifetime earnings that seldom ...
What has 40 names but is invisible in Virginia? The mountain lion, which holds the Guinness World Record for the mammal with the most names. Pumas were last reliably reported in the Commonwealth in 1882, though rumors still swirl of catamount sightings. We mention the painted cat’s many names because a particular legal document is like the cougar: the divorce ...
Contested divorces make headlines in Hollywood. Unremarkable, unexciting uncontested divorces are far more common, less costly, easier, and faster, but do not grip us the way marital splits do from “Married At First Sight.” But like Hollywood’s pampered stars and the fragile casts of reality shows, spouses in contested divorces may just be really bad at talking things out and ...
Cursive handwriting is a lost art. That is why most of us have no idea what “cross the T’s and dot the I’s” originally meant. The connected letters of cursive required the writer to return to the completed word to, literally, cross the ascending t and place a dot over every i. At any rate, with divorce, every attorney knows ...
Chessie the Chesapeake Bay sea monster probably does not exist. Snallygasters and Bigfoot may or may not exist in Virginia; the odds are against either of them, despite the hype provided by sites like Mysterious Universe1. One other mythical Virginia fantasy is the legal separation. In Virginia, you cannot claim “legal separation;” you can be separated, or you can be ...