Standards of conduct for Virginias Guardians ad litem (GAL) exist; you can find them through Virginia's courts. The problem is not what is written on the paper. The problem, for many Virginia men, is how the actual person, the one fulfilling the valuable role of child advocate, handles the job day to day. Personal bias, what appears to be a predetermined ...
More than 168,400 special needs children were enrolled in Virginia's public schools in 2016, according to the Virginia Department of Education. For 2013 (the most recently available year) Virginia recorded over 29,400 divorces. Those two typical statistics intersect far more often than most people realize. If you are contemplating a divorce and you are the father of a special needs child, ...
How will your life change after a divorce? Much like stopping smoking, your body will know immediately that you have shed some of the worry, stress, and apprehension you have been bottling up for months or possibly years. Other parts of your world change, too, like your taxes, finances, savings, and estate. One matter to tend to immediately: updating your ...
Sometimes in these pages we joke around a bit, get a little weird, or push a few buttons. Yet one area is always off-limits to those attitudes: children. Virginia's children are among the most helpless, fragile and innocent among us. Virginia's adults, and even more so Virginia's attorneys, have a high calling to protect Virginia's kids. Emergency custody hearings are ...
Who is a reasonable person? A reasonable person, simply put, can make commonsense decisions just as you or we would. We have handed the American legal system that legacy, in the form of a standard of behavior: what would a "reasonable person" do in this legal dilemma or that situation? What would that same "reasonable person" consider to be a "reasonable and ...
Technology is a marvelous thing. Some cities, for example, have an "online do-it-yourself" divorce program rooted in artificial intelligence. That's great, if you can get past all the questions that "screen out users with procedurally complicated situations;" and "screen out contested cases and those cases involving the potential, unintentional loss of rights." The courts recognize that some divorces are trickier ...
Congratulations, really, on your effortless, stress-free divorce. No surprises, everything went according to plan. All the loose ends are neatly tied up and you can get on with your life. What? That does not sound like the typical divorce? Of course it isn't — no divorce is "typical," and no divorce ends with all the pretty bows tied. Your divorce lawyer ...
Virginia does not have rigid guidelines for spousal support the way it does for child support. The laws are written to provide a judge wide discretion in deciding, first, who pays whom and, second, how much is paid. Spousal Support Laws The Code of Virginia includes a section, § 20-107.1, that outlines how a Circuit Court judge may decide spousal support. ...
Time machines never made any sense to us. If you went forward or backward in time with a time machine such as H.G. Wells described1, what's to stop some thief from making off with it, stranding you in either the distant past or future? Yet a time machine could be mighty handy when you find yourself nearing a divorce without a ...