CHILD SUPPORT – NO CHANGE IF CHILD AGES OUT – SEPARATION AGREEMENTS. How dare people try to keep their cases out of court by putting something they don’t disagree about and don’t want to fight about into an express written agreement? That seems to be judicial attitude demonstrated in a case called Virostko v. Virostko, ___ Va. App. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___, 26 VLW 1223 (3/20/12), where a couple (and probably their lawyers), proceeded on an unwarranted assumption about what lay people, and probably most non-Virginia judges and lawyers, doubtless regard as the most self-evident proposition in all family law: the ability of obligors to regard a child support obligation as ended when the child in question becomes an adult at age 18 (or 19…, etc.). Of course they only gave the Court of Appeals another chance to pontificate on how they surely ought to know that child support termination upon attainment of majority “is not self-executing.” Well O.K., so it’s not. But these foolish people felt that they were agreeing on child support amounts, and that if you put how the child support is going to diminish in your separation agreement, in writing, maybe then it can “self-execute,” can’t it? Of course not, the voices from on high intoned. It’s a job for judges -- and not common folk -– to make decisions about. Now of course we, who labor in these stony vineyards all the time, know full well how you can’t chip away at this judicial discretion that’s seen as such a sacred trust, and so long as Best Interest is part of the law of child support, it won’t change. Still devilishly counter-intuitive for the naive bumpkins who pay and receive it. But what of that? The Court of Appeals does, however, provide some prescriptive criticism about just how this incredibly acrobatic and otherwise-unthinkable feat can (supposedly) be performed. An incorporated final decree under §20-109.1 permissibly incorporates a valid such provision on three conditions: (1) Before approving incorporation, the trial judge at the time of the divorce must review the reduction-formula provisions for consistency with Virginia statutory public policy and the particular child’s best interests; (2) There has to be language added making clear that this doesn’t preclude some judge in the future from exercising the sovereign power to modify all this; and (3) The parties can’t, by invoking this agreement, terminate a supporting parent’s duty to pay support for that child. (Uh,……… yeah.) Of course if this is supposed to prevent an obligor from receiving that nasty shock we all know about when his child ages out, it’s clearly a safety net so full of holes that these parties and their counsel are likely to throw up their hands and give up on the effort. But wait, the Court says more. If none of the above three things would seem to do the trick, the Court of Appeals explains that the provision involved here merely said the parties would either agree upon a new amount based on the father’s then income, or assume that they cannot agree and return to court. That provision does not provide an “objective standard by which the parties could determine a new amount.” That makes it nothing but an agreement to try to agree, and if you have a self-executing agreement, it can’t be one of those.(Let’s see. First full moon after majority obtained? That’s objective.) Thus the trial court’s ruling that self-execution did not happen here is affirmed.