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This writer grew up as a Republican and recalls with some fondness the wars in the 1970s between liberal “Rockefeller” Republicans and conservative “Reaganites.”  The fight was for the soul of the party, whatever that was.  But those battles were pretty tame compared with today.

On March 18 of this year Republican Jeff Bartos announced…

Mark R. Ashton (vaccinated)

This week both the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times reported on a case in Chicago where a court decided whether a parent who was unvaccinated against COVID-19 could continue to visit with her 11-year-old child.  The judge initially ruled that visits would be suspended.  The news reports indicate that the…

This will not be a political piece.  There are enough of those.  But as just about everyone knows, on July 1 the New York attorney general and district attorney indicted both the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer on charges of income tax evasion.  The gravamen of the charges is that the Trump Organization…

The website MarketWatch publishes a kind of Dear Abby column related to family finances that touches on some very real subjects confronting families today.  On July 2, columnist Quentin Fottrell published a column in which a wife laments her husband’s spending habits and wonders whether she could be liable for his debts should he die.…

On May 26, the Superior Court issued an en banc ruling addressing whether a Court can order a child custody litigant to turn over records of her treatment compiled in the context of a MHPA proceeding.  The unanimous decision of the nine-judge panel was that those records were not subject to disclosure.

The opinion appears…

Recall March of 2020.  The country more or less stumbled into its first pandemic in a century and by the third week of March, Pennsylvania and its judicial system were essentially closed.  For the next 10 weeks we were told to quarantine.  Schools, office buildings, almost every form of activity was restricted or closed.  Friends…

As we have all witnessed, ours is an age when grandparent duties transcend “Saturday” night. Historically, Saturday was grandparent night when parents would have their night out.  Sadly, the explosion in substance abuse among young and middle age adults has forced many older couples to choose between taking their grandchildren in or seeing them placed…

There is hope that the plague is behind us.  Pestilence is on its way either in the form of a lantern fly or the return of the cicada after 17 years of peace.  For the divorce lawyer and his friend in crime, the accountant, there is another crisis emerging.  It’s the war over who gets…