Studying Family Law While Engaged to be Married

                 This guest post is courtesy of Adeola Adeleke, Regent Family Law student:

Being a law student in a family law course and being engaged simultaneously can be enriching and challenging. However, being engaged while studying family law can present unique opportunities and challenges. Family law deals with deeply personal and often emotionally charged matters, such as divorce, child custody, adoption, and domestic violence. Here's how being engaged might intersect with a career in family law:

Personal Relevance: Being engaged provided me with a personal connection to the subject matter of family law. We studied topics such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and spousal support that resonated with my own experiences and future aspirations. This personal relevance and connection that I have with the subject matter deepened my understanding of the material and enhanced my knowledge of the practical implications of getting married.

Gaining Practical Insights: My engagement provided me with practical insights into the legal issues and challenges couples and families face. Drawing on my new substantive knowledge I am better equipped to understand the complexities of interpersonal relationships and the dynamics of family law disputes. As individuals navigate decisions and compromises in their relationships, they can draw upon these experiences to effectively advocate for their clients and facilitate constructive resolutions in their cases.

Navigating Ethical Dilemmas: As a law student learning family law, ethical dilemmas will be encountered that require careful consideration. Being engaged heightened my awareness of the ethical implications of future legal practice. It's essential to adhere to professional ethics and standards while maintaining the trust and integrity of relationships. Being engaged equipped me with insight into the problematic personal situations families face. 

Future Planning: Being engaged while studying family law can prompt discussions with one's fiance about your future together, including potential legal considerations such as prenuptial agreements, estate planning, and family law issues that may arise in the future. Using this time to have open and honest conversations about your shared goals, values, and expectations for your future life together can be priceless.

In conclusion, being engaged while studying family law can offer unique personal and professional growth opportunities. It has provided valuable insight and taught me that by maintaining boundaries, managing emotional impact, and nurturing our relationship, I have started to navigate the intersection of my personal and professional life with integrity and, most importantly, compassion.  I embrace the personal relevance of my study of family law and leverage my engagement as a source of support and motivation.

Restoring a Troubled Marriage

 

“Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

                                                                            -Matthew 19:6

 This guest post is from Robert V. Fortmeyer, Regent Family Law student:

Reconciliation agreements, also known as postnuptial agreements or restoration agreements, are a valuable tool in preserving marriages that might otherwise be on the brink of dissolution. The case of Hall v. Hall, a decision by the Court of Appeals of Indiana, highlights the significance of these agreements and their enforceability under certain conditions.

In Hall v. Hall, a wife wanted to dissolve the marriage but decided to stay in the marriage after entering into a restoration agreement with her husband. This agreement laid out the distribution of property in the event of marital dissolution, giving her the financial protections she needed as a result of her husband’s dishonesty and ensuing incarceration. The couple remained married throughout the husband’s incarceration and for an additional eight years. Couples can use the base of a premarital agreement to make clear to each other what is important to them for the marriage to continue.

The Court in Hall found the agreement enforceable, affirming the notion that the mutual decision to remain married provided adequate consideration for the agreement. Because reconciliation agreements are governed by the laws controlling premarital agreements, the enforceability of reconciliation agreements is contingent on them being entered into freely, without fraud, duress, or misrepresentation. The Hall decision reinforces the principle that the intent to preserve the marriage, evidenced by the parties' actions in accordance with the agreement, is crucial in determining its validity.

An important aspect of the case is the court's consideration of the public policy favoring the amicable settlement of property rights among citizens whose marriages are being dissolved. Reconciliation agreements, when properly executed, serve this policy by providing a mechanism for couples to address financial and property concerns in a manner that can, rather than dissolve the marriage, help preserve the marriage. By delineating rights and responsibilities, these agreements can reduce uncertainty and conflict, potentially avoiding the stress and confrontation often associated with troubled marriages or divorce proceedings.

Reconciliation agreements represent a practical tool for couples and their advisors facing marital difficulties. By addressing key financial and property concerns, these agreements can provide a foundation for couples to rebuild their relationship on more stable ground. They not only offer a path to preserving marriages but also underscore the importance of mutual consent and fairness in marital arrangements, laying a firm underpinning toward family restoration.

Resizing Education: One Size Fits All?

 

This guest post is from Madison Durner, Regent Family Law student:

It’s a Monday morning and kids all around the globe are woken up before the sun to eat breakfast, get dressed, and rush out the door to catch the bus or get to the drop-off lane. Eight. Long. Hours. Children rotate through teachers and curriculum, sitting, listening, lunch, more sitting, more listening. Eight. Long. Hours. At a mere six years of age, we expect children to be able to endure a full day of instruction and direction along with a group full of others all expected to meet the same standard. At 16 years old, a teenager is itching to get into the real world and get experience but instead they sit, and listen, and sit, and listen. Eight. Long. Hours. Why should education be “one size fits all”?

Most of us know that from ages 8 to 18 school attendance for children is mandatory. This means all children will learn and be taught for the same amount of time until moving onto higher education or beginning their career…right? This idea can impose unrealistic expectations of children to all perform at the same pace and learn by the same teaching style. Every child learns and advances in different ways at different ages. Homeschooling provides another avenue for children to have the freedom to thrive in an environment designed to their needs. However, legislation is constantly being introduced that would impose increased requirements and unfair burdens on homeschooling families.

Washington Senate Bill 6236 specifically proposes that parents whose children are 6 and 7 years old are required to file an annual notice if they intend to homeschool a child once they reach the age requirement of 8. This would broaden the age of compulsory school attendance despite being so vague and unclear. If this bill is passed, it would not apply to children attending public or private school. Is this restricting the education plans of parents that homeschool their children?  It is unclear what the benefit of this burdensome bill would be. The freedom for parents to direct the upbringing of their children can be enhanced through clear and just homeschooling laws that allow for a fruitful environment to in which to engage, regardless of age.

Since the 1980s in Virginia, there have been multiple ways in which parents could qualify to teach their children including: obtaining teacher qualifications from the Virginia Board of Education, holding a bachelor’s degree from an accredited university, or using a program that adhered to state math and language arts. Virginia Legislature eventually revised these categories in the mid 2000’s to allow homeschooling to be provided to children in any manner. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSDLA) supports Virginia Senate Bill 83 that would simplify these multiple categories to a single category under which parents may homeschool. This would give all children and parents the equal opportunity to participate in homeschooling without being required to meet such strict criteria. Homeschooling should not come with hurdles and undue hardships, but with personal responsibility and the best interest of each child. Parents deserve to have the freedom to explore this opportunity and provide their children the ability to thrive in an environment that best suits their needs.

Help Defend Homeschool Freedom This Legislative Season. https://hslda.org/post/help-us-defend-homeschool-freedom-this-legislative-season.

Senate Bill 83. Home Instruction; removes certain criteria for parents. https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?241+sum+SB83

Advanced Directives: Are Attorneys Actually Serving Their Clients and their Families?

 

This guest post is from Regent Family Law student Harold Boatwright:

         The drafting of an advance directive can be a serious decision for many, but for others nothing more than signing a document along with a dozen more at an attorney's office, or even at the hospital. While everyone hopes that this document will never need to be used, the reality is that with advances in medical science people can be kept alive long after serious injuries. A first-year law student could see a problem with any ambiguity in this type of document but are advance directives being properly drafted to avoid these dangers?

States differ on whether they supply a form for people to sign or leave individuals to draft language themselves regarding their end-of-life decisions. Many will choose to have an attorney draft these documents but without a level of medical care specified, is there any real meaning from the words on the page? One phrase that has been used in thousands of directives to refuse further treatment is “When I can no longer carry on a meaningful life.” The origin of the phrase is a form published by the American Bar Association in 1989 and has since lingered in form directories of firms all over the country. This wording is commonly accompanied by phrases like “reasonable quality of life,” “extraordinary measures,” and “heroic measures.” This type of language can bring about more confusion than clarity when a decision needs to be made.

The burden of the solution relies not only on the attorney but also on the client. To save their families from hard decisions and painful litigation clients need to take the time to be specific with their goals. Similarly, if attorneys are charging clients for drafting these documents they need to be detailed in their work and ask potentially difficult questions to truly serve their clients.

Advanced directives can be an effective tool when tragedy strikes a family by saving the surviving members from having to make hard decisions but only when specific instructions are given. Attorneys and clients both should take the time to work together to create an effective document instead of using generic language that invites litigation and makes a difficult situation much worse.

Breaking Generational Trauma: Understanding & Advising Clients and Families

 

This guest post is courtesy of Autumn Miller, Regent Family Law student:

          Every client, even yourself, is a byproduct of hundreds and thousands of years’ worth of experience, history, and even trauma. Anything your ancestors may have done may still affect you (and your clients) today! This is called intergenerational trauma, more commonly known as generational trauma. Generational trauma is defined as “[t]he transmission of trauma or its legacy, in the form of a psychological consequence of an injury or attack, poverty, and so forth, from the generation experiencing the trauma to subsequent generations.” (APA Dictionary of Psychology) While traumas from the past include famine, war, and mass migrations, the traumas from Generation Z (1997-2012) and Alpha (2012-2024) could consist of 9/11, mass school shootings, polarized politics, and Covid-19. As an attorney, it is vital to understand the deep history every client comes to you with.

Understanding their trauma will allow you to advise them in a way that can help them heal and/or find a remedy for their problem that best fits them. The best way to illustrate generational trauma is the age-old story about how a family cuts off the wing tips of a turkey before putting it in the oven for Thanksgiving. The family has done this for decades until they finally ask the matriarch why she cut off the wing tips. Great-Grandma responds, “To make the turkey fit, my oven was tiny.” This story illustrates that the phenomenon affects not only the actions of a subsequent generation but can also affect an individual medically.

          Encouraging a client to consider family mediation or therapy to identify the weak points in their history is a helpful course of action. Once they can identify those points, the client can work within the family unit to solve the problem. Sometimes, generational trauma is not as terrible as surviving the Holocaust or the Potato Plague. It could even come in the form of corporal punishment parents inflicted on young children. Even adding family mediation to an attorney’s practice to help families break the bonds of generational trauma could be a step in the right direction.

 Your clients are people created in the image of God who have histories and experiences worthy of understanding. History teaches us to “step into” the shoes of an author of a historical document. This allows historians to understand the thoughts and decisions of the author best without passing judgment on them for those things. In many ways, the practice of law may benefit from this technique to help our clients. 

Take your client’s deep-rooted and often uncovered trauma and use it to heal a family in family mediation or advise a client executing a parent’s estate on dealing with their siblings. Everyone has trauma, and if they cannot break the cycle, they too, will doom the next generation with the same fate.

How the Irish Might be Saving the Family

 

Historian Thomas Cahill’s New York Times bestselling book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization” revealed the key role the Irish people have played in preserving the rich human history from fallen Rome. By saving the parchments of antiquity and copying and recopying these language fragments, essential elements of civilization, and even beautiful masterpieces (such as the Book of Kells) remain today.

From that rescue western civilization was not lost, but preserved, even from Viking invaders and marauders. Saving the written language and its values amounted to saving western civilization.

Last month the Irish just might have saved it again, when the people of the Republic of Ireland rejected the constitutional family amendment which would have offered replacement language for “mothers” and some chosen roles “in the home,” as well as a replacement of the term “family” with “durable relationships.” With 67% voting “no,” the outcome was resounding. While some argued that the amendment failed because it was poorly worded, Irish citizens and their families were firm in their rejection.

Read the entire op-ed in The Washington Times at https://highergroundtimes.com/higher-ground/2024/apr/12/how-irish-may-be-saving-civilization-and-true-defi/.

In a separate fight over language, last week Scotland enacted a law that makes it a years-long imprisonable offense to “incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, transgender identity, sexual orientation, age or disability.” Because this law essentially makes it a hate crime to misgender someone without knowing one may be doing so, a Scotland grade-school teacher shared her very real concerns with me. Because she already struggles to learn the names of her 300 or so students, she is concerned that she may not know each student’s preferred pronouns, noting as well that those preferences tend to change on a weekly basis for numerous students.

Her fears may be realistic; inthe first week of the new legislation, 4,000 investigable complaints were made to police, amounting to 60 complaints per hour. Not only did these keep the police from policing other criminal activity, but it was quite a revelation that of those first 4,000 complaints, 3,000 related to language used by Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf —a major and humiliating blow. The irony is astonishing.

Also last week, Connecticut Democrats were fighting over another language issue, so to speak, in determining if the addition of “expectant mothers” could be added to the descriptor “pregnant persons,” a term intended to avert prejudice and discrimination. The argument was that the latter is the more inclusive term.

Subscribe to have The Washington Times’ Higher Ground. 

Rep. Robyn Porter, a New Haven, Connecticut Democrat who is a member of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus (BPRC), was the amender of the bill referencing “pregnant persons” to also include the phrase “expectant mothers.” When challenged by open hostility she offered her systematic thinking: “We want to talk about discrimination? Well, I’m here to tell you that Black people in America know that very well. …  We were mothers first. Yes, times are changing, and I’m fine with that because that’s life. … But you don’t get to grow, and you don’t get to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion and exclude me and the other women like me who identify as mothers. You don’t get to do that.”

With biology asserting itself like this from Dublin to Connecticut, incarceration for unmet pronoun preferences in a Scottish grade school seems more than problematic – it feels chaotic, even in a free Scotland. So instead, maybe, as the Romans had to in the first centuries, we might begin to look to the Irish again as rescuers of sorts.

As commentator Patrick Luciani stated, “The Irish referendum wasn’t only about rights, tolerance, or one’s right to choose a preferred gender identity but about the nature of language. When the Irish were asked to vote, they knew intrinsically that words matter, and changing the constitution by abandoning the phrase ‘mother’ or ‘woman’ to satisfy the political trends of progressive gender advocates would have a deep and lasting effect on their culture and identity. That was a step the Irish weren’t willing to take.”

When language of gender inclusivity and reproductive freedom is used to limit women, and their families, that language tends to be a tool to acquire power, particularly in the law. People can see right through it. Saving the language and its values amounts to saving society.

So when the Irish people voted “no” they might have been saving civilization all over again. 

Harmony in Disarray: Collaborative Law as An Alternative to Family Law Litigation

 

            This guest post is courtesy of Ben Sacaciu, Regent Law Family Law student: 

In family law disputes, where emotions often run high and relationships are deeply intertwined, the traditional adversarial approach of litigation can exacerbate tensions and lead to prolonged, costly battles. Collaborative law emerges as a beacon of hope, offering families a more amicable alternative to resolve disputes. Unlike the confrontational nature of litigation, collaborative law fosters open communication and cooperation between parties, allowing them to actively participate in crafting mutually beneficial solutions. The collaborative law process also involves assistance from a mental healthcare professional, as well as a financial professional. Utilizing such neutral experts helps provide for the emotional and financial needs of the parties.

The inclusion of mental health professionals is a key feature of the collaborative law process because such experts can provide the parents with invaluable information about the best interests of the children. Recognizing that children can be the most vulnerable parties in a divorce separation, collaborative law endeavors to create a supportive environment that prioritizes their well-being. By encouraging parents to work together rather than against each other, this approach helps cultivate healthier co-parenting relationships. Child custody and visitation arrangements are meticulously crafted with the child’s emotional and developmental needs at the forefront, ensuring that the resulting agreements promote stability and consistency for the child.

 

Unlike the often adversarial and unpredictable nature of litigation, collaborative law empowers families to find solutions that work for everyone involved. By fostering open dialogue, preserving relationships, and prioritizing the best interest of the child, collaborative law stands as a progressive and compassionate alternative in the complex landscape of family law. As individuals seek a more humane and constructive way to navigate the challenges of divorce and separation, collaborative law shines as a pathway towards resolutions that prioritize healing and the well-being of all family members.

Is Montana the Wild West in Divorce Policy?

Blog host note: Having two Montana students in my Family Law course this spring semester has been extremely helpful for me to learn more about that state's views on families and their interactions with the law. As the last post considered issues surrounding the value of life in Montana, this post considers Montana's public policies on marriage. Both students, as you will read, have shown that a Christian attorney can make a tremendous difference in his or her state to help to bring about stronger families. That's what a legal education at Regent is all about.                                                                                                                                      -Lynne Marie Kohm

This guest post is from Regent Law Family Law student Esther Lines:

As a student from Montana in Family Law this semester, I was excited to get into the nitty gritty of Montana's laws. Montana citizens care deeply about family, freedom, hard work, agriculture, and the outdoors, which are values that I share. Montana is a predominantly conservative state, though interesting population dynamics in a select few larger towns have recently turned the state blue in certain elections. The tension between liberal and conservative parties has risen as more people out of state move to these more popular towns and begin to change the dynamics and values of the local people. This interesting mix of the local and the foreign, the old and the new ways, is a new challenge facing the citizens of this state. However, there is still a unifying conservative nature across the state. With this basic understanding of the conservative nature of Montana, I was expecting my deep dive into Montana law to reveal strong laws that bound husbands and wives and worked to protect the family unit. 

In 2019, however, these new dynamics changed our Family Law code and all of our reconciliation laws were repealed. See §40-3-101 through 127, Montana Code Annotated.  

Montana law has seemingly thrown up its hands and embraced the attitude of the "wild west" in its divorce policy. Montana is a no-fault divorce state, with bare minimum grounds for proving the marriage is "irretrievably broken." The burden of proof is light, as the Montana Code Annotated states in §40-4-104, only a showing that either the parties have lived separately for more than 180 days or a showing of "marital discord that adversely affects the attitude of one of the parties toward the marriage" is enough. Seriously? My state legislature really thinks the best thing for its citizens is to allow for divorce when only one of the parties does not have a good attitude toward the marriage anymore? My first reaction was deep disappointment, thinking Montana had given up its familial values and morals. But then, with the help of friends around me, I began to realize that maybe Montana's concern for the complete freedom of its citizens to do as they please is not such a bad thing and actually benefits lawyers who wish to promote genuine familial love and commitment. And here's why: you cannot legislate morality, and less regulation promotes honest  representation and Christian responsibility among attorneys. 

The decision to be committed to one's spouse must come from within, and no amount of legislation can force a person to love the Lord's instruction and the other party to the marriage more than themselves and their own desires. When these values cannot be enforced by legislation in the first place, the potential cons of strong government regulation against divorce can potentially outweigh the pros. When two parties have decided to dissolve the marriage, human nature tends to show that they will get what they want. This landscape encourages family law attorneys to argue for the dissolution of the marriage, whether or not the marital discord really meets the standards for divorce the law requires. When you combine stringent regulation of marriage with stubborn human nature, the incentive and likelihood that lawyers will engage in illusory arguments to satisfy the requirements for divorce rise. However, by leaving the door open for citizens to leave a marriage when they have decided they are going to, the lawyers representing them can now satisfy the law's requirements without doing argumentative gymnastics to meet the standards of more strict divorce jurisdictions. 

Additionally, Montana's easy divorce paradigm has created the opportunity for Christian attorneys to "cowboy up" and actively encourage clients to consider alternatives to divorce, knowing the law is no deterrent. There is a need for gospel witness in this arena, and Christians need to step up and counsel their clients in the instruction of the Lord where appropriate. Montana divorce law is no threat to marriages so long as we have true Christian attorneys willing to engage with their clients about the harms of divorce and the beauty of selfless, committed love. 

Montana may be the wild west, but that does not mean Montana is not ripe for the growth of Christian attorneys who can counsel their clients with the influences of goodness, truth, and beauty through divorce decisions. That will restore families.