Minneapolis MN Divorce Law Blog

When a Minnesota court orders one parent to make payments for the everyday expenses of raising their children, this order has the force of law behind it. When the paying parent fails to keep up with child support payments, the state can impose many penalties.

In a recent case, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that one of these penalties can be to suspend the parent's driver's license. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by a lower court.

As Minnesota lawmakers consider legalizing same-sex marriage, supporters are talking a lot about love. And that's all well and good, but some of the most important rights that come with a legal marriage have to do with less romantic notions. Many of the benefits of marriage in Minnesota don't become apparent unless or until the couple goes through a divorce. Legalizing same-sex marriage would have profound implications for the breakups of same-sex couples when it comes to disputes over property division, child support and child custody.

In an unofficial domestic partnership, when the couple splits up, Minnesota courts do not require equitable distribution of property as they would at the end of a marriage. There is generally no alimony. If the couple has children but only one of the partners is a biological or adoptive parent, the other partner generally can't be ordered to pay child support, but neither does that partner have any rights of parenthood. The biological or adoptive parent would generally automatically have custody of the child and the other partner would have no rights of visitation and no right to protest the other partner's relocation with the child to another part of Minnesota or to another state. A partner who has helped raise a child would have no legal right to see the child again.

When Minnesota couples decide to end their marriage, often one partner has much lower income potential than the other. For example, one may have deferred a career to stay home with the children while the other became a well-paid banker. Even if they decide to split their assets equally, the banker still has the income potential of a banker while the other has the income potential of a stay-at-home parent - which is to say, not much.

It's for cases like these that Minnesota courts decide that alimony is in order. Also called spousal support or spousal maintenance, alimony is an obligation to provide support for the financial needs of an ex-spouse. The divorcing partners can come up with an agreement on their own for the court to approve, or the court can impose an alimony obligation based upon a set of guidelines.

Minnesota parents who are married and live together often argue over issues of parenting time, such as who should help the kids with homework or pick them up at school. But when parents are divorced, or were never married, these arguments blend into much more serious matters of child custody.

Last year, Minnesota lawmakers were set to overhaul the state's child custody laws to make the default minimum amount of time each parent gets with a child 50 percent. That is, unless some other concern applied, a father would generally get custody half the time and a mother the other half. This move had strong support, especially from advocates of fathers' rights, who often claim that current child custody laws are biased toward mothers.