Court Opinion

ID: 9530235
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:58:33.431405+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:28:02.679817
License: Public Domain

Armstrong, J.
(concurring). The judgment appealed from in this case ordered the plaintiff to contribute to the support of a child over the age of eighteen years and necessarily implied a ruling by the judge that he was empowered to make such an order. The record reveals nothing of the legal arguments the plaintiff made in the trial court and affords no basis for an inference that the plaintiff waived or abandoned any particular legal argument, constitutional or otherwise, bearing on the ruling in question. Therefore this case does not fall within the authority of the cases cited by the majority, all of which dealt with records that indicated, either explicitly or inferentially, that a party was attempting to argue on appeal an issue which he had not raised in the trial court.
I concur in the result reached by the majority, because the plaintiff’s constitutional argument is without merit. General Laws c. 208, § 28 (relative to children of divorced parents), and c. 209, § 37 (relative to children of married but separated parents), both as amended through St. 1975, c. 661, represent a reasonable legislative attempt to secure to dependent children of broken homes advantages custom*483arily made available to children of other homes and comparable age. In families that remain together, decisions by parents whether to terminate support when their children reach the age of majority are usually tempered by consideration of the educational and economic realities of our time and are in any event decisions jointly arrived at by the parents. There is nothing in the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which bars the Legislature from making reasonable provision for cases where the familial decision making process has broken down. See Commonwealth v. Henry’s Drywall Co. Inc. 366 Mass. 539, 544-547 (1974); Commonwealth v. MacKenzie, 368 Mass. 613, 616-618 (1975); Rosary v. Commissioner of Pub. Welfare, 370 Mass. 862 (1976). The plaintiffs contention amounts to little more than that the court should apply his notions of sound policy rather than the policy determined by the Legislature.