Family Law Newsletter
| Publication year | 1976 |
| Pages | 1486 |
1976, October, Pg. 1486. Family Law Newsletter
All of us have doctors as clients, and all of us have parents as clients, and most of us are parents as well. Therefore, sooner or later we may come in contact with the problem of a child born with birth defects and must deal with the following questions: Should an operation be performed to save a child's life who may be paralyzed or retarded thereafter?; and Who makes the decision---the parents, the doctors, or the state? There is a very thorough reporting of a program conducted on these questions at the ABA Family Law Section meetings in Atlanta under the title, "The Right to Survival." The article is excellent.
I think we are all looking for new ways to solve old problems, and I would like to suggest a few to you that were reported in the BNA Family Law Reporter during the past month.
---In New York, the court required a visiting parent to execute a deed to property owned in the state of New York. The deed was to be held in escrow to guarantee that parent's promise to return the children to the custodial parent after a visit out of state.
---An Illinois court decided that a "too low" estimate of future income could amount to a misrepresentation sufficient to require the setting aside of the settlement agreement. The spouse in question was a professional writer who had represented that his income would be $30,000 the next year, when actually it was $150,000.
---A Pennsylvania judge entered into a very well-drawn settlement agreement, which specified that child support payments were specifically conditioned upon the custodial parent not discussing with the child the paying parent's relationships with other persons, maintaining a "sophisticated attitude," and interacting harmoniously to avoid exposing the child to tension and stress. The court found that the custodial parent had failed to meet these conditions, and therefore, the judge was excused from any further child support payments. Another interesting wrinkle in this case is that the judge in question was a woman who retained her first husband's name for her use professionally, even after she remarried. Her first husband took exception to this, but he lost.
---A number of states have a long-arm jurisdiction act in matrimonial actions; for example, California, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and...
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