Graham.Law Blog

Parents owe their children a duty of support – this has long been recognized in Colorado’s child support statute (), and in every family law case imaginable. But can psychological parents, or other third party nonparents owe child support? Three years ago, in a groundbreaking decision, the Colorado Court of…

Colorado law authorizes judges to appoint, with the consent of both parties, a decision-maker to assist the parents in making parental decisions when they are unable to agree. But unlike with a judge or an arbitrator, the decision-maker does not have unlimited authority, but instead has a very narrow statutory…

Contempt is one of those areas of family law which seems easy – one party is violating the order, so is found to be in remedial contempt of court. However, the reality is far from simple, and as we just wrote about in a recent blog, not every legal right…

Ah yes – contempt of court! Your opponent violated a court order, and you, as the aggrieved party, are going to get justice at last. After all, surely it is true that every legal right has a remedy (a Latin phrase, Ubi jus, ibi remedium, which is sometimes misquoted as…

The Colorado Court of Appeals issued a decision recently concerning commingled assets which reminds us of the power that spouses have in marital agreements (in this case, a “prenup”, or prenuptial agreement) to deviate from the normal statutory property division in a divorce. For a complete discussion of prenuptial agreements…

A new Colorado Court of Appeals decision is unusual in a couple of respects – it’s not often that a property division is reversed on appeal, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an appeal in a case where the marital estate was worth so little (even though to the…

Simply being unemployed at the time of a hearing does not necessarily make imputing income to that parent appropriate. And that’s especially true when the parent is enrolled in full-time education. In Settles, both parents were full-time students at the time of divorce: the father, a former medical doctor who…

OK, it’s hard to fit the real headline into a brief title, but the actual holding of a recent Court of Appeals decision is that the trial court erred when finding the biological father to be the child’s father in a parenting case, because all presumptive fathers were not included…

It seems the issue of what counts as a financial resource in a contempt or maintenance case still results in seemingly contradictory decisions from the courts. We recently wrote a post discussing the Sheehan case, where the Colorado Court of Appeals held that a trial judge could not find a…

Colorado has a statute allowing a third party nonparent to seek visitation (i.e. “parenting time”) with a child under certain circumstances in an Allocation of Parental Responsibilities (APR) action. Typically, the nonparent will be someone who has cared for the child for at least 182 days, but a lesser-used provision…