Skip to main content

No Fault is Now No Problem in New York

By Lauren Schroeder
On August 15, New York Governor David Paterson signed into law A.9753A/S.3890 (text available on the New York State Assembly's website), and yesterday, the major changes to New York's divorce laws took effect. Prior to this, New York was the last remaining state without a no-fault divorce option available to those wishing to end their marriages.

Instead, section 170 of its Domestic Relations Law stipulated that an action for divorce required one of these grounds: "cruel and inhuman treatment" of one spouse by the other that "endangers the [spouse's] physical or mental well-being"; abandonment for at least one year; one spouse being in prison for "three or more consecutive years" after being married; adultery; living apart "pursuant to a decree or judgment of separation for a period of one or more years after the granting of such decree or judgment".
This required one spouse to be considered responsible for causing the end of the marriage, even if both of them wanted to get divorced.

The new law amends section 170 to add the option of the relationship between the spouses having "broken down irretrievably for a period of at least six months, provided that one party has so stated under oath." The parties will first need to also settle any issues relating to property, support, and visitation, or else the judgment will not be granted.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le
1 comment
Read more

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

By
Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires
Post a Comment
Read more