Court Opinion

ID: 9662264
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 23:04:17.962018+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:38.177509
License: Public Domain

HUMPHREYS, Justice
(dissenting).
I recognize that the opinion prepared for the Court by the Chief Justice is based upon acceptable principles of law, but I am obliged to dissent. I dissent, because, in my opinion, the result of the application of these otherwise acceptable principles is the unjust unsettling of family separation and divorce property arrangements arrived at in possible or probable contemplation of the father’s obligation to continue the support of his children at least through some of their college years. And that the opinion will relieve the father of this obligation by retroactive application of the eighteen-year old statute, which is wrong.
It cannot be denied that where a husband and wife with children had property or income, or both, which was consistent with their giving them a college education, that property division settlements and in solido divorce awards made prior to the eighteen-year old law inferentially contemplated, to a greater or lesser degree, such collegiate education of the children. In this light, when the property and the custody of the children was awarded to the wife, and the obligation of education by regular payment for child support was charged against the husband, all of this had to be, by necessary inference, taken into account, in the division of the property and the determination of the husband’s monthly support obligation.
Now, to say as a matter or law, regardless of the facts of a case, that because of the eighteen-year old adult statute, the father’s obligation to make regular support payments in behalf of the education of his children is wiped out, and that there need not be a readjustment with respect to the other property that was involved in the separation, is to do unconstitutional violence to the basis upon which the whole case was earlier settled or decided.
While the eighteen-year old statute brings the child earlier into the responsibilities of adulthood, it should not be applied retroactively so as to undo solemn decrees presumptively entered into on another basis, and so relieve a parent of an obligation to aid in the collegiate education of his children. Since, in all probability his property was divided either by contract or by court on the assumption that he was to bear the cost of his children’s education, to undo all this by the retroactive application of a statute, results in injustice. Such a holding removes from the father’s side of the scales of justice a weight, his obligation to educate his children, that was taken into consideration when his wife’s side of the scales of justice was being brought into balance. Such a retroactive application of the statute is, in my opinion, wrong. So, I respectfully dissent.