The law, P.A. 98-0961, which was crafted by the ISBA Family Law Section Council, creates a formula for calculating maintenance based on the gross income of the parties and the length of the marriage. Up till now, judges calculated maintenance without using a statutory formula similar to the one that applies to child support awards, instead relying on a list of factors that appear at sections 504 and 505 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act. As a result, maintenance decisions vary widely, and lawyers have found it difficult to predict what a court will do when awarding maintenance.
The new formula will change that, once a court makes the threshold decision that maintenance is appropriate in a given case. Although judges aren't required to use the formula, they must make a finding explaining why they did not.
Under the formula, a maintenance award should equal 30 percent of the payor's gross income minus 20 percent of the payee's gross income, not to exceed 40 percent of the parties' combined gross income when added to the payee's gross. Here's an illustration of how the math works.
Assume the soon-to-be-ex-husband grosses $50,000 a year, and his wife earns $30,000. Thirty percent of $50,000 is $15,000, and 20 percent of $30,000 is $6,000. Subtract $6,000 from $15,000, and voila – the husband owes the wife $9,000 a year in maintenance. Simple enough.
But things aren't so simple in this example, because that $9,000 payment would push the wife's annual gross over the 40-percent-of-combined-income limit. How? If you add $50,000 plus $30,000, you get $80,000, 40 percent of which is $32,000. That $32,000 – $2,000 more than the wife's annual gross – thus constitutes the cap on her income after maintenance. Therefore, the husband in this case owes the wife only $2,000 per year under the formula. (Note that the higher the payor's income is in relation to the payee's, the less likely the 40-percent rule is to limit the payee's award.)
A separate formula based on the length of the marriage establishes the duration of the maintenance award. For example, for a marriage that lasted five years, the maintenance award would continue for 20 percent of that span, or one year. On the other end of the continuum, maintenance could be permanent or last the length of the marriage for a couple that has been married 20 years or more.
"In Illinois, awards of maintenance have become increasingly and disturbingly inconsistent," ISBA Director of Legislative Affairs Jim Covington wrote in a letter to Governor Quinn before the law was enacted. "Even when facts and circumstances are remarkably similar, maintenance awards vary widely and unpredictably – from case to case, from courtroom to courtroom, from circuit to circuit, from region to region.
"Thus, with the best of intentions, judges, lawyers, and clients are routinely forced to reinvent the wheel with each and every case, wasting valuable time and money of courts and clients," Covington wrote. "Appellate cases often aren't as helpful as they should be because only the knotty and contentious cases get appealed – hard cases make bad law."
Covington noted that the law makes the following changes in addition to the formula:
The bill "doesn't change the primary judicial responsibility – determining whether maintenance is appropriate" in the first place, Covington wrote. "If maintenance is appropriate, then guidelines can serve as a reference to assist judges and promote settling of cases."
The law takes effect January 1, 2015.
In re Marriage of Iqbal
Illinois Appellate Court
http://www.illinoiscourts.gov/Opinions/AppellateCourt/2014/2ndDistrict/2131306.pdf
Postnuptial agreement (PNA) signed by parties was unenforceable as it violates public policy. PNA gives counselor sole power to determine which parent will have custody of children, as counselor has sole power ot declare whether party seeking divorce is doing so reasonably, and is sole arbiter of whether either party has violated any part of PNA so as to forfeit any claim to custody. PNA is substantively unconscionable, and thus unenforceable, as its terms are significantly one-sided. Court's grant of sole custody to wife not against manifest weight of evidence, as husband often spoke negatively of wife and was found likely to interfere with children's relationship with wife.(ZENOFF, concurring; BURKE, specially concurring.)
and People v. MelongoToday, in two separate decisions, People v. Clark, 2014 IL 115776, and
People v. Melongo, 2014 IL 114852, the Illinois Supreme Court considered
the constitutionality of several sections of the eavesdropping statute, 720
ILCS 5/14-2. In each case, the Court unanimously held that the current
eavesdropping statute is unconstitutional because it is overly broad.
In Clark, the defendant recorded courtroom conversations involving himself,
his attorney and the presiding judge. He also recorded a hallway
conversation with the adverse party's counsel. Clark did not obtain
consent from any of the parties to record the conversations. He was
indicted under the Illinois eavesdropping statute. He filed a motion to
dismiss the indictment and argued that the section under which he was
charged violated his First Amendment rights and his right to substantive
due process. The circuit court agreed and dismissed the indictment,
bringing the matter before the Supreme Court in the State's direct appeal
in defense of the legislation.
Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Garman noted that the Legislature
amended the eavesdropping statute in 1994 to prohibit the recording of any
conversation unless all parties consented, even if there were no
expectation of privacy. Because this criminalizes the recording of a whole
range of conversations that cannot be deemed in any way to be private, and
because the legislation covers a broad array of wholly innocent conduct, it
is overly broad. Having held that a substantial number of the statute's
applications are unconstitutional, the Court found it unnecessary to
address the remaining arguments.
In Melongo, which was not consolidated with Clark, but had been argued on
the same day, Chief Justice Garman, again writing for a unanimous Court,
stated that the Court's analysis was guided by its holding in Clark.
Again, the strictures of the statute were not found to serve any legitimate
interest in protecting conversational privacy, rendering the statute
unconstitutional on its face.
