Attorney Find Blog

Anna Nicole Smith and the people around her have been involved in more legal issues than the typical attorney of late–tens of millions of dollars were at stake even before Smith’s death; her estate claim made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but still hadn’t been resolved at the time of her death. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in her late husband’s estate, there’s a bankruptcy claim involved, too. And now, after Anna Nicole’s untimely but unsurprising death, a startling percentage of the nation has been waiting with bated breath to find out who fathered Dannielynn, Anna Nicole Smith’s 7-month-old daughter. The baby has been living with Howard K. Stern, Smith’s companion and former attorney, who is listed as the father on Dannielynn’s birth certificate. However, DNA tests today revealed that Larry Birkhead is Dannielynn’s natural father. The legal battles are far from over, however. Smith’s late husband’s family continues to fight the inheritance that Smith claimed during her lifetime and that would now pass to Dannielynn, and no ruling has been entered regarding custody of the child.

An interesting post over at The Divorce Blog lays out an innovative new approach to child support enforcement: put a picture of the “deadbeat” on pizza boxes. With non-payment of child support at crisis levels across the country, many states and counties have enacted creative programs to attempt to enforce child support obligations or collect from unwilling parents. The pizza box initiative is the brainchild of the Butler County, Ohio Child Support Enforcement Agency Director, and follows other Ohio counties that have included flyers featuring deadbeat parents with utility bills.

There’s an interesting post on The Divorce Blog about a proposed Maryland law that would require Orthodox Jewish men filing for divorce to sign an affidavit indicating that they had removed all religious barriers to remarriage for their wives. Under Jewish law, a man must release his wife before she can remarry after a divorce, although there is no such restriction on remarriage by the husband.

The proposed legislation raises interesting questions about the already murky division between state authority and religious commitment in the marriage arena.