Do the Virginia courts want to get into the tricky business of construing and enforcing Iranian marriage contracts? Apparently so. When the Fairfax Circuit Court enforced such a contract, it construed it as being a premarital contract, and as requiring husband to pay wife 514 gold coins known as Bahar-E-Azadis, and held it valid and enforced it. Husband’s various claims on appeal included that it was wrong for the court to admit this document into evidence, along with a BBC Multilingual English translation. But Aha!: husband didn’t sufficiently note his objections at trial so as to satisfy Rule 5A:18. The appellate court can’t really tell what his objections were, and the same goes for his objection that the contract is fatally vague on its face unless bolstered by expert testimony.
Now as to letting the wife be her own expert and testify as to Iranian and Islamic law, it appears that her testimony was simply that she was owed these 514 gold coins as her marriage price and could demand them at any time, i.e., testimony about the terms of a contract she was a party to, so no problem there. (It’s not a case, like some that lawyers see, calling for payment in goats or camels, but one calling for money in the form of gold). Nor can this enforcement be faulted under Code §20-107.3, because this was not an equitable distribution, but merely a judgment that wife had a valid right to that gold under the contract. Afghahi v. Ghafoorian, unpublished, 24 Va. Lawyers Weekly 1189 (3/30/10).