Divorce: Fighting For, About, and Around Kids

Actions for divorce are like any other civil suit wherein the rights and duties of parties are decided and judgment is rendered. That is, aside from the fact that at the end of the case, both sides are still really mad.

There are exceptions, but the general rule is that if a judge or magistrates decides the outcome of who gets custody of the kids and on what days, everyone feels cheated. Dissolutions, which are simply divorces where the parties agree how to divide everything prior to filing in court, are always preferable but often impossible in the emotionally charged time of separation.

The legal issues of property settlement in a divorce, apart from alimony, are fairly cut and dry - everything acquired during the marriage that is not a gift or devise directly to one of the spouses gets divided in half. Problems deal mainly in valuations. For the calculation of alimony, it seems to matter more where you are getting a divorce than to whom you were married - it varies county to county.

Dividing a child is obviously more difficult. The wisdom of King Solomon is often needed and absolutely inadmissible in divorce court. (Solomon's proposal to halve the child really wasn't all that clever - what kind of hooligan would actually agree to cut the child in half in front of someone who was in the process of writing a book of the Bible? I think everyone already knew the likely outcome of it all when the retrobate showed up to the hearing with her face all exposed wearing a worn-out Ravi Shankar concert T-shirt.)