As family law attorney, I am proud to say that my colleagues and I have a wide ranging set of concerns about the well-being of families and individuals in our communities. We are not only focused on divorce, custody and parenting time, alimony and child support, paternity, etc. We share a common concern for the […]
On June 26, 2015, in the landmark decision of Obergefell v Hodges, the US Supreme Court legalized “gay” marriage as a protected right under the US Constitution. It seems that since the Obergefell decision, the war on LGBT – or, as many of us like to think of it, human rights – is alive and […]
Having grown up during the era of civil rights protest for racial equality, I see alarming parallels to the current battle for same-sex marriage equality. And, just as the landmark US Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education, which mandated school integration, did not result in immediate and peaceful attaining of its goal, […]
It is indeed an exciting time to be practicing family law – there are changes in the wind, and today, I would like to remark on one of them that I see coming – prenuptial agreements and gay married couples. Once upon a time prenuptial agreements (prenups) were the sole province of the rich and […]
I put the title of this blog in quotation marks because that was the search I googled this morning while contemplating the framework for these comments. Given the extraordinary number of “hits” mostly to posts which have occurred since the US Supreme Court ruling on June 26, 2015, I am not the only one who […]
It is expected that the US Supreme Court will be accepting cases challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA was enacted by the US Congress in 1996 and essentially defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. It makes clear that gay or lesbian unions are not […]
A decision by the Maine Supreme Court last week, in an inheritance dispute of considerable value involving a very large trust set up by one of the founders of IBM for the benefit of his descendants, the Court ruled that an adult adoption of a same-sex partner was legitimate. The issue largely centered on whether the adoptee-partner was “a descendant” and part of the trust beneficiary class who could gain a share of the substantial trust. According to the Court, she is.
adopt, adoption, constitution, constitutional, estate, estates, family, gay, incest, Lawrence, lesbian, marriage, trust, trusts