Massachusetts Alimony: Watching the Pot - Part 1
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
The number one preoccupation among Massachusetts divorce lawyers this year is trying to figure out how the appellate courts will construe many of the complex and interactive features of the year old comprehensive alimony “reform” statute. They hope that once this appellate pot boils, “guidance” will flow that will, in turn, give lawyers some sounder basis for predicting how trial judges’ discretion will be bounded and exercised in the future.
There are many uncertainties in the statutes, such as:
- How should judges apply their deviation authority to avoid alimony termination when very long marriages bump up against payors’ retirement age in an economic environment where people are working long past “retirement age”?
- Where judges perceive that new alimony cut-offs are unfair, how freely should they approach unequal property allocations as a form of compensation?
- Should judges “count” the time of temporary alimony orders towards calculated durational limits?
- Are judges expected to calculate alimony or child support first?
Will the cases come down in a trickle or a rush? Will the Supreme Judicial Court pre-empt the Appeals Court? Will the decisions be narrowly crafted, allowing for slow and thoughtful development; or will we see broader and a more rambling style of statutory construction? Will the “unreported”, or so-called “128” decisions of the Appeals Court have any coherence at all?
This important and fraught process will only start this year. Will it help or hurt? In our next two blog entries, we will think about this from two perspectives: that of a divorce mediator, and as a divorce arbitrator.
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