Law On High Heels: final judgment

Monday, October 7, 2013

Faye's Story Redux

Back in March, I told the story of my old client Faye in three parts: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

The critical moment in Faye's story was when at the eleventh hour on the eve of the bench trial on the issue of whether or not Faye's brothers would be heirs of their mother's intestate estate, Faye and the private investigator both located copies of the Final Judgment of Adoption. When we disclosed to the brothers' attorney that we had located the document, the brothers dropped their claim. So we never had to go to court and prove the fact of the brothers' adoption, which was essential to Faye's case.

My next post will go through how I had planned to get the key pieces of evidence admitted into evidence at the bench trial.

Julie

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Weird Judgments

In last week's story, found here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ) I told you about an old divorce decree from 1940's Virginia. When we received a copy of it, I was blown away by some of the recitals it contained.

Any judgment will contain a few "recitals." Recitals are statements of procedural matters, and sometimes contain findings by the court that are required for the judgment to be entered.

The divorce decree between Faye's parents contained a recital that both the husband and wife were of the Caucasian race. When I first read it, I did a straight double take. Then I remembered that back when Faye's parents were married, the law in the state of Virginia prohibited marriage between a black person and a white person. This was referred to as the crime of miscegenation.

The law was challenged, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in 1967.

There's this weird thing that happens in cases: many times, case names strangely reflect the underlying facts. The case in which the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia marriage law is Loving v. Virginia, which is kind of awesome, isn't it?

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