Chief Justice, Georgia Supreme Court, Says We Need to Combat Divorce The Way We Discourage Smoking

Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears (a divorcee) said "As a mechanism for signaling to young people the right time and the right person with whom to have a baby, marriage has no peer. . .
. . . Marriage is also the best child welfare, crime prevention and anti-poverty program we have. We must, therefore, protect it."

The good Justice did not elaborate on how she proposes to do this, though I'm guessing she would not go along with my proposal to make getting married significantly harder...

Canadian Appeal Regarding Dad's Grounding 12-Year-Old Daughter

Actually, the end result of high-conflict parenting.

Volokh Conspiracy has a link to the original opinion in French, a rough translation into English, and comments including my own two cents worth.

Same-Sex Marriage: The Dominoes Falling?

In the wake of the Iowa's Supreme Court's ruling, noted below, two somewhat less surprising developments:

In Vermont, the state legislature overrode a veto by the governor of that state's same-sex-marriage legislation;

and

in Washington D.C. , the Council, the city's governing body, has voted to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states and countries.

Iowa Supreme Court Finds Limitation of Marriage to Opposite-Sex Couples Unconstitutional

. . . or at least, under the Iowa Constitution. Those who thought that this idea was confined to the "loony Left Coast": here's the opinion, care of, and thanks to, Howard Bashman's "How Appealing".

Also, perhaps less surprisingly, Sweden has now legalized same-sex marriage.

After the Love Is Gone, After The Pink Slip Arrives...

All over the country, as the employment picture becomes gloomier, folks all over who were previously ordered, or agreed to pay moderate amounts of child and spousal support, based on their previous moderate earnings, are going back to court to modify those orders, because they no longer have the moderate earnings to pay from. As with the down-turn in economy generally, the phenomenon, noted first on the East coast, has rolled slowly westward, like a big ugly snowball. Recession, like divorce, "unsettles many of the parties' significant plans and assumptions, no matter how carefully crafted during"* better times.

Marriage of Destein (2001) 91 CA4th 1385, 1394