I know it seems strange for me to ask an a question on this board, but we have some great participants and I'd be curious to know their reactions to this case I'm involved in. Now as background, there is no clear cut answer to this question in California law that I or the other side in my case (they have a lawyer too) know of. Tomorrow morning the judge gets to make a decision for us so it should be fun. Everything in this case is public information, by the way.

I represent a husband in a disso. As I said wife has a lawyer too. About 12 years ago wife talked husband into signing a Nevada Joint Petition for Divorce, which she filed and had a judgment entered on. Neither one of them had ever been Nevada residents (they were and are and always had been California residents). Nevada has a 6 week residency requirement to file for divorce. As background, wife did this because she was in a hurry to get remarried to a guy who was going to be deported. She got the divorce really fast (less than one week after the papers were filed--Nevada has no waiting period on divorces). So, she marries this other guy and 10 years later he divorces her (in California). The NV judgment said nothing about alimony incidentally.

Last year she filed a case here to "domesticate" the Nevada judgment. They later dropped that case because it was jurisdictionally and procedurally defective and filed a new disso case. Now the wife (or former wife) is in court tomorrow asking for spousal support from husband(#1). Can she do it? Re-marriage usually terminates a spousal support obligation, right? She argues that the second marriage doesn't count because it's void because the Nevada judgment was void (for fraud in asserting the residency requirements). I say she shouldn't get any support. Any opinions about this?

Is there a female equivalent of bigamy? Seems she may be guilty of that because the Nevada divorce may have been illegal.

That would seem to mitigate any support from schook #1.

I think she gets nothing. Since she sought nothing from the first divorce in her haste,she should get nothing now.

I say let husband number two foot her support.

Thanks for your comments and I'll look forward to more.

I've put everything I can think of already in a brief but I think tomorrow I'll just say, "You Honor, in addition to everything else I've already said, and so as to not repeat myself, I'll only add that this just doesn't pass the 'sniff test'--she wants support? It's like, 'what's wrong with this picture?'"

That's a great legal argument, don't you think?

Maybe that will get a laugh out of someone. It will be interesting.

Lets us know how the judge rules.

I will let you know how it turns out.

Usually judges don't want you to repeat what you've already written down and only ask you to say something they haven't heard. I'm going to say, and I only touched on this in a footnote in my brief, that I had always heard that the judgments, orders and decisions of all courts, anywhere in the country, were presumed valid until another court came along and declared them invalid. In other words, since that's never happened in this case (even though I claimed once that the NV judgment was invalid no court here or there ever ruled on that) the NV judgment is presumptively valid. So if wife wants support she has to go to Nevada to get it. Second, the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA), which all states have had for 10 years, says that when a court makes a support order that court has exclusive jurisdiction to modify it no matter where the parties later move to. So even though the NV court had not made a support order, as in this case, it could have and thus has continuing exclusive jurisdiction to do so now.

That's about all I can think of. It's a weird case.