It was long believed by many that if a defendant in a domestic violence hearing plead the 5th Amendment (i.e. chose not to testify on the grounds that it might incriminate him/herself), that the court could draw an adverse...more
Earlier this month, I wrote a blog called Court’s Should Not Issue FROs to Address Parenting Issues. That blogged addressed a case where the trial court entered a Final Restraining Order (FRO) to remedy custody and parenting...more
Social media has become a prevalent part of people’s lives. Many people post about how great their life is or about the good things that their children do (guilty as charged.) Others debate politics. Some post pictures of the...more
2/9/2024
/ Consent Order ,
Cyberbullying ,
Divorce ,
Domestic Violence ,
Facebook ,
Harassment ,
Restraining Orders ,
Sensitive Personal Information ,
Social Media ,
Spouses ,
TRO
Going back more than three decades, there are Appellate Division cases that offer caution about the abuse of the domestic violence statute to get a leg up in an impending or pending divorce or custody matter. At around the...more
It should come as no surprise that after the end of a relationship, people sometimes do bad things to the former love of their life. Really, it’s a tale as old as time. But what if, as an act of retaliation, a party makes a...more
Seems pretty obvious that if a court is going to explain the ramifications of the right to have counsel in a domestic violence matter and the ramifications of the entry of a finding of domestic violence and the entry of a...more
In January 2020, the Appellate Division considered an important question: how should a judge assess a party’s request to appear at a trial and present testimony by way of video transmission? The timing of this consideration...more
5/14/2021
/ Appellate Courts ,
Bifurcation ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Domestic Violence ,
Due Process ,
Pro Se Litigants ,
Remote Hearings ,
Restraining Orders ,
Telecommunications ,
Videoconference ,
Virtual Litigation ,
Witnesses ,
Zoom®
There used to be a family judge, who, with his law clerk, spent a lot of time on Google, looking up property records, Zillow “values” and other information regarding the parties and their property. While most of the time it...more
Victims of abuse have many reasons for not reporting prior acts of domestic violence – either to friends, family, co-workers, etc. or the police. Logically, the failure to report does not negate the fact that the abuse...more
More than 11 years ago, I wrote a post on this blog entitled The Abuse and Misuse of the Domestic Violence Statute. From the statistics, we can see that this is still one of the most read items we have published, because the...more
There has been much news coverage about how China’s divorce filings spiked after their periods of quarantine and lock down ended including in articles and Bloomberg, the Daily Mail and many other publications. In fact, in...more