Wide Latitude, but Not Carte Blanche

I always tell people in my office that they can do ALMOST anything they want when they fashion their divorce agreement. Almost anything that is not totally unfair will be accepted by a court, even if it is slanted in favor of one party or another. My clients often craft settlements that meet their needs, even if they may seem odd to an outsider who doesn’t understand the context.

However, a judge in New York recently declined to approve the divorce of a man and a woman because the judge felt it was fundamentally unfair. The court believed that it saddled the immigrant woman with too much debt, not enough assets, and inadequate monthly support to fund herself and her three adolescent and pre-adolescent children.

Family law is inherently flexible (or, less charitably, vague), but the reasons underpinning the loose structure are sound: the courts want to afford families and spouses the widest possible latitude to govern their affairs as they see fit. However, the court must still exercise its supervisory authority in the most extreme cases, as the New York case illustrates.