Category Archives: Family

People involved in contentious family law proceedings need to proceed cautiously …. They believe that mediation is only effective in family law cases under the..Family law news and headlines from around the web.

Bankruptcy, Blog, Business Law, Civil Rights, Family, Legal News

Manhattan judge asked to determine if rent guidelines should be based on tenant affordability

For some tenants, the rent is still “too damn high” — but is that something the city’s Rent Guidelines Board can consider when it decides just how high rents can go for more than 1 million rent stabilized apartments?

That is what a Manhattan judge has been asked to determine by landlords who argued Tuesday that tenant affordability is not a factor that the board can weigh when it sets rent increases each year.

“Affordability is not the be all and end all of the rent stabilization law,” Jeffrey Turkel, the lawyer for the Rent Stabilization Association, a landlord group, told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James.

The RSA has asked the judge to rule that the board was “arbitrary and capricious” in 2015 and 2016 for even considering tenant affordability when it decided to freeze rents for stabilized tenants renewing their leases.

Full Article – http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/manhattan/landlords-don-rent-guidelines-based-tenant-paychecks-article-1.2960656

Blog, Divorce, Family, Legal News

After the holidays, Divorce Day looms

Danielle Braff Chicago Tribune

The Christmas season isn’t always the happiest time of the year for couples, according to a recent survey by the law firm Irwin Mitchell Solicitors, which found that divorce filings jump by nearly one-third following the holidays.

First comes Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas and New Year’s. And then there’s Divorce Day: the Monday after Christmas break, when the flood of divorce emails clogs attorney inboxes, said James McLaren, partner with McLaren & Lee, in South Carolina, and former president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

“It always happens the first Monday that we’re back in the office, back after the holiday,” McLaren said.

Over at the U.K. law firm Slater and Gordon, they’re already preparing to deal with the influx of divorce requests.

They normally experience double the number of inquiries the first few days of the new year, but some years, they’ve seen a threefold increase. It’s most acute over the first few days of January, but the spike remains high throughout the entire month, said Amanda McAlister, head of family law at the firm.

It’s become such a significant time to divorce that the firm recently studied the reasons behind the trend.

Forty percent of married couples had problems in 2014, with 10 percent having severe issues, according to the study, which polled married Brits right before Christmas.

Twenty-five percent said the holiday break could possibly make or break their marriage, according to the survey, and 10 percent said they were definitely going to decide whether to go forward with their marriage depending on how well the holiday went.

Read Full – http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-christmas-divorces-family-1213-20161208-story.html

Blog, Business Law, Divorce, Family, Legal News, Supreme Court

Sumner Redstone paid millions to mistresses and others who gave him ‘sexual favors,’ legal filing says

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That must have been a hell of a flight.

Media titan Sumner Redstone gave out many millions of dollars to multiple women — mistresses, a flight attendant and that attendant’s sister — according to legal documents filed Monday by his 45-year-old ex-girlfriend.

The CBS corporate jet flight attendant alone got $18 million — and her sister, whom Redstone allegedly bedded, received a cool $6 million from the randy billionaire, court filings claim.

The explosive allegations by former Redstone paramour Sydney Holland were accompanied by a warning that she “may be forced” to seek testimony from the 93-year-old mogul’s celebrity friends as well as from executives from Viacom and CBS, whose shares he controls, to substantiate her salacious claims.

Redstone’s legal team, in an emailed statement to CNBC, said, “Ms. Holland’s cross-complaint is a work of fiction punctuated by not-so-subtle threats of extortion and an overwhelming stench of greed.”

In her Los Angeles Superior Court filing, Holland said Redstone “gave tens of millions of dollars to various other women — who he had no intention of marrying and was not in love with — at the time he was engaged to marry” Holland.

Full Article – http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/12/redstone-allegedly-paid-millions-to-mistresses-and-others-while-getting-sexual-favors.html

Blog, Business Law, Divorce, Family, International

Danny Devito & Rhea Perlman’s $140 Million Split

Four years after the couple’s last breakup, Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman have decided to call it quits for good.

It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Danny Devito and his Cheers legend wife, Rhea Perlman have split up once again. Friends of the couple told Radar Online that “this time it looks like the end.”

It was only a month ago that Rhea Perlman was boasting about Devito, calling him her “hubby” on Twitter, but the two have apparently been living separate lives. Devito and Perlman have been married for 34 years. They are currently in the midst of discussing a $140 million divorce.

Danny and Rhea have three grown children together: Daniel, 29, Grace, 31, and Lucy, 33. According to sources, the pair has broken up and gotten back together many times before ultimately deciding on divorce.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/3751969/celebrity-divorce-shocker-danny-devito-rhea-perlman-140-million-split-famous-relationships-news/#ZQp8RhQYoH3rrHa5.99

Blog, Civil Rights, Family, Legal News

The big problems with the Obama administration’s new teacher-education regulations

By Valerie Strauss October 24 at 6:01 PM

The Obama administration recently published long-awaited regulations for programs that prepare new K-12 teachers.

The U.S. Education Department had attempted to do this several years ago, but that effort was notable for several controversies, one of them a suggestion that teacher-preparation programs be evaluated in part by the standardized test scores of the students being taught by program graduates. Now we have the final regulations — and critics of the original draft remain unsatisfied.

For one thing, the new regulations, as this story by my colleague Emma Brown explains, require states to issue annual ratings for teacher-prep programs, an effort, supporters say, to separate the successful programs from the failures. They still also require each state  to evaluate teacher-training programs based on student learning, but this time leaving it to the states to decide how to measure academic growth and how much it should weigh in an overall rating.  That means that the department will permit states to use test scores for evaluation — a method that is not used to evaluate any other professional preparation program.

 There are other problems with the new regulations, as well, as explained in this post by Lauren Anderson and Ken Zeichner. Anderson is a professor and chair of the Education Department at Connecticut College. Zeichner is a professor of teacher education at the University of Washington at Seattle who has done extensive research on teaching and teacher education.
Full Read  – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/10/24/the-big-problems-with-obama-administrations-new-teacher-education-regulations/