It’s been less than a year since the United States Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriages will be recognized nationally. Now the Virginia Supreme Court is getting into the act. The commonwealth’s highest court is making a move toward divorce equality.
It’s a case out of Fairfax County, where a man and woman divorced back in 2008. The man was paying alimony until the divorced woman moved in with a new romantic interest. But because that new romantic interest was a woman, she argued that she was still entitled to alimony.
The lower courts agreed with the woman. But University of Richmond law school professor Carl Tobias says that argument didn’t hold weight in the state’s highest court. “In a sense this is an offshoot of the marriage equality cases, but the court doesn’t really speak of it specifically," says Tobias.
For many people, the case raised a simple question, says Virginia legal expert Rich Kelsey:
“Why didn’t the lower court or even the appeals court come up with this same ruling, which seems obvious and seems common sense?" says Kelsey, “Virginia courts do a good job, in fact a great job, of not having their lower courts remake or rewrite law. They believe that is best left to the legislature or to the highest court."
Virginia was one of the last states to overturn its longstanding ban on cohabitation, which ended in 2013.
