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Boston collaborative lawyer David Hoffman has an op-ed in today's Christian Science Monitor about collaborative law and the new ABA Ethics Opinion approving of it.
Ontario social worker Gary Direnfeld has posted a short television interview about collaborative divorce.
Yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer (see the continuation of this post, courtesy of the Smart Marriages listserv) has one of those stories that family lawyers notice so often in the media, that takes something that has been going on for decades in the courts and labels it an alarming new trend. This time it's that states don't recognize marriages performed by people with mail-order fake ordinations as clergy. That has always been the rule, but now many of them are online ordinations instead of mail-order ones, and supposedly that's somehow different.
This is an area where the line between church and state is very narrow and twisty, but it has been in place for 30 or 40 years and has been very stable. It has been articulated in case law and is laid out in statutes whose wording varies between states, but basically, if something that looks and acts like a religion, with enough people exclusively involved in it even to have a wedding, names you some kind of leader and authorizes you to perform marriages, then the state authorizes it, too, automatically.
Some states, like my own, let people apply for one-time authorization to perform the marriage of friends or relatives. Both my father and I have had the great honor and responsibility of doing this, with court orders in hand. Conversely, even the great pastor and musician Andrae Crouch once caused a legal snafu here in my hometown of Arlington, Va. because he is an out-of-state clergyman and he didn't get a court order before marrying four couples at a shopping mall.
The American Bar Association has issued an Ethics Opinion endorsing Collaborative Practice (a.k.a. Collaborative Law, Collaborative Dispute Resolution, or Collaborative Divorce), and responding to the concerns raised by the Colorado bar association opinion that got so much attention in the media and on this blog.
The opinion is available via the ABA web site, but right now it can be viewed and downloaded only by ABA members. At some point in the near future nonmembers will also be able to download it for a small fee.
