Family Law From Around the Nation
By Rob McAngus1
1 Rob McAngus is a partner at Mueller Family Law, P.C. He is board-certified in Family Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and the International Academy of Family Law Specialists. Rob’s practice is devoted primarily to complex and high-conflict divorce matters. Rob serves on the Advisory Board for the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, the Texas Family Law Foundation Board and the Texas Academy of Family Law Specialists Board. Rob may be reached at rmcangus@muellerflg.com.
Marital Agreements: New York’s Third Department affirmed an order setting aside a premarital agreement the parties signed in 1977 before marrying in Canada, holding its essential terms too indefinite to enforce. The husband was to contribute $1,000 toward household effects that would become the wife’s separate property, and to pay her $10,000 during the marriage or convey property of acceptable value. Forty years later, no one could say whether household effects reached the contents of the garage, whether gifts counted toward the $10,000, or even whether the figures were Canadian or United States dollars. With no severability clause and intertwined provisions, the entire agreement fell though, and the court cautioned that striking a contract for indefiniteness is a last resort. Gaudette v. Gaudette, No. 259 N.Y.S.3d 663 (N.Y. App. Div., May 14, 2026). Wyoming reversed a district court that read a postnuptial agreement’s separate-property exhibits to award each spouse his or her retirement accounts outright. The general separate-property paragraph expressly carved retirement accounts out of that scheme, leaving a separate paragraph to govern them: balances as of June 1, 2017 remain separate, but contributions, earnings, and interest accruing after that date are joint property subject to equitable distribution, regardless of the exhibit listing. Smerski v. Lemon, 590 P.3d 1205 (Wyo. June 4, 2026).
Property Division: Nebraska applied its source-of-funds rule to mixed-character property and held that using premarital land as collateral for loans did not itself create a marital interest in the land. Loan payments are contributions to the asset acquired or improved with the proceeds, not to property that merely serves as collateral. Stava v. Stava, No. S-25-469, 321 Neb. 886 (Neb. July 24, 2026). Oregon applied ordinary tracing principles to cryptocurrency. The husband bought it with funds withdrawn from his premarital retirement accounts, and it appreciated roughly $161,000 without active management. That rebutted the presumption of equal contribution, and occasional withdrawals for family expenses did not so commingle the account as to defeat tracing. In re Marriage of Fial and Fial, No. A184041, 349 Or. App. 673 (Ore. Ct. App. May 20, 2026). Rhode Island approved valuing the estate as of separation rather than trial in a marriage lasting about two and a half years, citing its brevity, the husband’s sole fault for the breakdown, and findings that he was not forthright. The wife’s unvested options and restricted stock units went entirely to her because they vest on her continued employment and would otherwise become golden handcuffs tied to a short marriage; awards vested as of the separation date were split sixty-forty. Hogan v. Wong, 360 A.3d 55 (R.I. July 22, 2026).
Child Support: Georgia held that the trial court erred by excluding a Google employee’s stock awards from child-support income and by classifying a 529 plan and two UTMA accounts, funded after filing with marital assets, as nonmarital without proper analysis. Byers v. Byers, 379 Ga. App. 892 (Ga. Ct. App. June 8, 2026). Pennsylvania resolved how the forty percent shared-custody threshold is measured when a parent has very different custodial shares of each child. The father had no time with the older child and half the time with the younger. The Superior Court held the split-custody offset did not apply because he was the obligor for both, and that the provision governing varied partial or shared schedules controlled instead; his aggregate twenty-five percent earned him nothing. Mosher v. Mosher, No. 1189 MDA 2025, 2026 WL 1719383 (Pa. Super. Ct. June 15, 2026).
Child Custody: Colorado drew a bright line between modifying parenting time and restricting it. A father whose work took him more than 100 miles away several days a week moved to adjust his schedule, and the district court instead cut him from 160 overnights to roughly 115, a reduction of 28.1 percent, without imposing supervision or location conditions. The Colorado Supreme Court held that a purely quantitative reduction, however large, is not a restriction triggering the heightened endangerment standard unless it eliminates parenting time altogether or imposes qualitative constraints on the manner, location, or environment in which it is exercised. In re Marriage of Dale, 589 P.3d 868 (Colo. May 26, 2026). Oklahoma reversed an order reducing a father’s time without addressing whether equal access would harm the child. Section 110.1 presumes substantially equal parental access on request, rebuttable only by a specific finding of detriment supported by findings of fact and conclusions of law. Duggan v. Duggan, 591 P.3d 1139 (Okla. Civ. App. May 7, 2026).
Relocation: Washington addressed how phased parenting plans interact with the relocation statute. The presumption favoring relocation does not apply when parents share substantially equal residential time, defined as at least forty-five percent each. The father had about forty-three percent when the mother served notice, and the plan called for an even split once the child reached kindergarten. The Supreme Court reversed the trial court’s average of 46.9 percent, holding the statute requires measuring the phase in effect when notice is served, not phases the plan merely anticipates. In re Marriage of Hauk and Wuesthoff, No. 104074-1, 2026 WL 2266444 (Wash. August 6, 2026). Tennessee treated the thirty-day deadline to oppose a relocation petition as mandatory; the father filed his opposition 104 days late, and the trial court properly struck it after finding no good cause or excusable neglect. Mosby v. Meachem, No. W2024-01938-COA-R3-CV, 2026 WL 1804764 (Tenn. Ct. App. June 23, 2026).
Parentage: Nevada held that a woman without a genetic or gestational connection could pursue a maternity and custody action by alleging facts supporting presumptive parentage, where her partner alone signed the gestational surrogacy agreement but the couple raised the child together for roughly three years before separating. Lorenzo v. Gendebien, No. 90082-COA, 2026 WL 1765993 (Nev. Ct. App. June 18, 2026). Ohio went the other way for an unmarried same-sex couple whose relationship ended months before Obergefell, holding its artificial insemination statute confers natural-parent status only on the consenting spouse of a woman who conceives by that method and cannot be stretched to reach partners who were never married. In re L.E.S., 182 Ohio St. 3d 185 (Ohio April 28, 2026).
Military and Retirement Benefits: Nebraska held a decree may not both award a former spouse Survivor Benefit Plan coverage and permit the servicemember to substitute a new spouse upon remarriage; once SBP coverage is awarded as property, it cannot later be reduced or eliminated by events in the other spouse’s life. Wahl v. Wahl, 321 Neb. 819 (Neb. July 17, 2026). South Dakota reversed a circuit court that applied a coverture fraction to cut a former wife’s share of military retired pay from 20% to 16.1%, where the parties’ separation agreement awarded a flat 20% with no marital-service limitation. Shevling v. Major, 35 N.W.3d 833 (S.D. May 13, 2026).
Attorney Conduct: A California appellate court affirmed $20,000 in Family Code section 271 sanctions against a party who stipulated to bifurcate a premarital agreement’s validity, participated in trial-setting conferences for roughly eight months, then declined to give a European Beverage waiver only after her own scheduling request was denied. In re Marriage of Martinez and Camou, 121 Cal. App. 5th 822 (Cal. Ct. App. July 9, 2026). Georgia affirmed a custody and contempt order against a father with years of noncompliance and harassment of school officials, then imposed a $10,000 frivolous appeal penalty against him and a separate $1,000 penalty against his attorney. Dunn v. Dunn, 933 S.E.2d 85 (Ga. Ct. App. June 25, 2026).
You Don’t See This Every Day: After a Georgia trial court found a father’s child support contempt petition frivolous and intended to harass the mother, she sued him and his fiancee in another county under Georgia’s RICO Act, alleging a conspiracy to file false documents. The Court of Appeals dismissed on the view that RICO does not reach garden-variety domestic disputes; the Supreme Court of Georgia vacated, holding the Act’s text contains no exclusion for racketeering activity that happens to occur in a domestic setting. Warner v. Espitia, 932 S.E.2d 537 (Ga. June 30, 2026). Finally, a Mississippi wife learned through community gossip that she had been divorced months earlier. No return of service was ever filed, and the notary whose seal appeared on the filings testified she had never met the wife or signed the documents, and that the seal was about a quarter the size of her real one, indicating it had been copied from another file in the attorney’s office. The Court of Appeals reversed the denial of Rule 60(b) relief and remanded with instructions to set aside the divorce judgment. Merritt v. Merritt, No. 2024-CA-01158-COA, 2026 WL 1732580 (Miss. Ct. App. June 17, 2026).
