Pennsylvania Family Law

The Family Courthouse at 1801 Vine Street in Philadelphia is a place families mostly want to avoid at all costs.

The “typical family” is no longer typical It’s sometimes amazing to consider how much the nature of the American family has changed over the last generation or two. The old pattern was remarkably uniform: Dad worked 9-to-5 outside the home, five days a week. Mom stayed at home and was responsible for maintaining the household […]

You know that it is time to end your marriage, but are you sure that you have a legal reason to get a divorce? Pennsylvania law only allows a couple to divorce in certain circumstances. Those circumstances include: Abandonment without a reasonable cause for one year or more. Adultery. Cruel treatment that puts your life […]

A lot of people think that a long-standing area of law is completely settled and unchanging. Take family law, for instance: we’ve had the practices of marriages, divorces, adoptions, and so on for as long as anyone can remember, so nothing much can change there, right? Oh, so wrong. Even the staid topic of family […]

The old proverb says, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” That’s not a fair way to look at all marriages, but many young couples in Pennsylvania have learned that marriage is not quite what they expected. For some troubled relationships, the solution turns out to be a postnuptial agreement. Like the more familiar prenuptial agreement, […]

Over the years the Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld a trial court’s decision to enforce a post-nuptial agreement. An often-cited case is from 2013. This case involved an agreement between two spouses who had been married for thirteen years and contemplated divorce. It outlined the parties’ economic rights and included a provision that the wife would […]

In an opinion filed in December 2012, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed its prior holding as to the standard of review of parenting coordinators’ decisions in custody cases. Parenting coordinators are individuals whom the court appoints to aid enforcement of custody orders. After the court enters an order for legal and/or physical custody, the court […]

A recent Pennsylvania case featured two ex-spouses who disagreed whether the husband was entitled to a modification of their existing support order. In the case, Windley v. Schwarz, the spouses were divorced in New Hampshire and thereafter agreed to a uniform support order. Under the agreed upon order, the husband was to pay the wife […]

Classes have started back up again in most schools throughout the Philadelphia area. The start of a new school year is always exciting, but when you are divorced, you are likely to feel some degree of stress. You may wonder, for example, if the current custody schedule will work, or you may not trust that […]

An essay recently published online makes an interesting argument that the law should presume that divorcing parents should get equal custody time with their children. The idea has been floating around for some time, but no state has adopted it. In most states, including Pennsylvania, if the parents cannot come to an out-of-court settlement, the […]