Family Law’s toughest assignment by far was the separation agreement for the Jack and Jill Hill divorce case. The separation agreement is where the differences between the spouses really have to be confronted for the first time and the nitty gritty of breaking apart a shared household puts everyone’s nerves on edge. No wonder, then, that each section of the document has a “yes we do agree on this/no we’re still fighting about it” box to check. Divorces, like torts, are grueling but necessary processes. The anguish of divorce today is piddling compared to the long-term personal misery and resentment of the fault-based divorce days when the law forced you to lie in order to get closure. There’s a reason the government put an end to that and now allows people an escape when “the legitimate objects of marriage have been destroyed”.
Tag Archives: separation and divorce
Family Law assignment scenario
My Family Law course focuses pretty heavily on composing separation, custody, and divorce documents, so the professor handed out a sheet with a hypothetical couple, their children, their assets, and their tribulations and foibles. These formed the basis for several assignments that went from the initial filing and restraining order all the way through to the final divorce decree. I reproduce the scenario document here so that my future assignments based on it will be comprehensible.
And these were my first three documents produced from those assumptions:
The El Paso County Combined Courts have a, shall we say, quirk of using Wingdings characters for checkboxes on their downloadable forms, which makes them very difficult to fill out on the computer. I can’t imagine this encourages people to efile, but maybe they were concerned that creating real checkboxes in MS Word would make people with older versions of the software unable to open the documents.
Prenups can be fun!
Or at least they can be when the assignment scenario is as humorous and ripped-from-the-tabloids as this one.
Personally, I believe that prenuptial agreements get a bad rap. The most common complaints are that being so concerned with how the money gets split up is mercenary and unromantic, and that making contingency plans for if the marriage fails undermines the idea that you’re supposed to work to make sure your marriage is for life. My response to this has always been that someone whose love for their spouse is strong enough that they want to make sure even a divorce is as amicable and fair as possible is more romantic than flowery declarations that one’s love is blind to matters of money. Marriage has historically been and continues to be more advantageous for men than for women. We need to protect ourselves, ladies, even as we follow our hearts.
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