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Ending a marriage is never easy, but Kelly Clay reports at ReadWrite that things just got easier as Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper has granted 26-year-old Ellanora Baidoo permission to serve papers to her elusive husband via a Facebook message. Invoking the social network was a last resort. Husband Sena Blood-Dzraku's whereabouts in the real world were unknown. But because he communicated with his estranged wife via phone calls and Facebook, Baidoo knew where to find him online. Justice Cooper says the "advent and ascendency of social media," means sites like Facebook and Twitter are the "next frontier" as "forums through which a summons can be delivered." Previously, if you couldn't find a defendant, you had to leave the notice at a last-known address or publish it in a newspaper, and there was no guarantee the defendant would know about it.
Before Cooper agreed to her using Facebook, Baidoo had to prove the Facebook account belongs to her husband, and that he consistently logs on to the account and would therefore see the summons. Attorney Andrew Spinnell says he has contacted Blood-Dzraku twice on Facebook, but has yet to hear back. If Blood-Dzraku refuses the summons, Spinnell says the judge can move forward with a "divorce by default" for his client. "She's not asking for any money," says Spinnell, "She just wants to move on with her life and get a divorce."
(Score: 1) by Bacon Bits on Friday April 10 2015, @08:54PM
That's an extremely naive outlook.
When you're married, there's often a choice about where to live, how to raise children, etc. and since the choices are made as a unit, usually benefiting one partner's career to the detriment of another's. Now, the way careers work, the longer you're in one, the higher your salary. if you take, say, 10 years off to raise children, you're not just out 10 years' salary. You're out the salary, the experience, and the higher salary you would be being paid. Punishing someone because they acted in good faith during a marriage and sacrificed their career for the sake of their partner's career and the marriage as a whole is not fair.
Alimony is an attempt to correct the fact that the partner who was still working enjoyed significant benefits which allowed him or her to spend additional time and effort on his or her career because his or her spouse was there to support him or her. That career would not be as successful or lucrative without that spouse there. Nobody who's been in a loving, supportive marriage would deny that fact. That support has real, tangible value, even though it's not a paid occupation. As a society, we recognize how valuable spouses are towards producing a better society for today as well as often raising our children, and, in an attempt to encourage men and women to devote their lives to someone else's career offer alimony as compensation in the event the marriage dissolves. It is, in effect, unmarried insurance.