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| It's a cycle . . . |
By Chris Larson
In family court, when hunting in my mind for support for a proposition I hope is legally sound, I’m tempted (I’ve actually done this) to cite Weaver. Odds are, this reference is correct, as the Weavers have been to the Supreme Court so many times that any proposition is probably supported in one of their cases. To the list of such citable propositions, add this: think twice before representing your spouse in the spouse’s divorce proceeding.
The most recent iteration of this long-standing battle (this one) upholds a trial court decision holding mother in contempt for failing to comply with an order placing the parties’ minor child in father’s care.
Curiously, or perhaps not, the Court also remands the case to determine whether father’s attorney, also his spouse, should be disqualified from further representing him.
The background for the recent decision is simple: mother apparently violated the trial court’s order giving father parental rights and responsibilities for the 16-year-old child. She was ordered to pay $100 per day that he remained in her home, deductible from father’s spousal maintenance payments to mother.
We take a detour here for a moment to wonder whether the 16-year-old child had any voice in this decision and presume, without knowing, that the teenager did not, though, having some knowledge of teenagers, imagine that this was not for lack of opinion on the child’s part or for lack of a driver’s license.
At any rate, the Court cites evidence for mother’s willfulness in keeping the child from father, including writing him that she could not force the child to go to his home, so she would have to call the police to force him to do so. Apparently, however, she did not follow through on this threat, resulting, along with some rather vindictive things she said about or to him, in the underlying contempt order.
Finally, the Court detours into a murky area on which it has no trial court order to address: the ethical question whether father’s wife may also serve as his lawyer. The Court notes that she is intimately involved in the dispute, and questions whether her representation crosses an ethical line.
It certainly seems to imagine, hypothetically, that this representation is improper. The Court declines to decide this issue on appeal, which is not surprising because it seems there is no lower court order to address. Rather, it remands to the trial court to determine this thorny problem raised apparently sua sponte by the Supreme Court.
One has to wonder whether the high court rather hopes that disqualification of the only attorney in the case will lighten its docket of further cases titled Weaver v. Weaver.
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