The VLW Blog

A wife wins her appeal and attorney’s fees after her husband violated their PSA by failing to name her as a beneficiary of his military survivor benefit plan, the Virginia Court of Appeals said today. Its decision in Nelson v. Nelson was one of three divorce cases decided today by unpublished opinion. A Fairfax Circuit [...]

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A permanent spousal support award cannot be explicitly pegged to the local formula used for temporary support, the Virginia Court of Appeals said today. An appeals court panel reversed a wife’s monthly support award of $4,159 because the record did not show the Henrico County Circuit Court actually fixed the amount of support after weighing [...]

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A husband who voluntarily paid a $3 million equitable distribution award and $72,000 of wife’s attorney’s fees has forfeited his right to challenge the court-ordered payments on appeal, the Court of Appeals said yesterday. But the husband got a consolation prize. The appellate panel in Stephenson v. Musgrave said a Roanoke County Circuit Court erred [...]

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“Cohabitation clauses” commonly show up in divorcing couples’ PSAs. Nobody wants to keep paying support to a spouse who has moved on and moved in with somebody else. But such cohabitation clauses are not necessarily “self-executing,” as the Court of Appeals reminds us today in Stroud v. Stroud. The property settlement agreement between Joseph and [...]

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The attorney general’s office is sponsoring a legislative fix to a problem that it doesn’t believe really exists. The issue is the practice of having nonlawyers sign motions to hold in contempt parents who are delinquent in their support obligations. Kimberly J. Daniel, a juvenile and domestic relations district judge in Fairfax County, ruled in [...]

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