Mark Ashton

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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…

We live in an age when it is oh-so-easy to incur debt, sometimes without even knowing it.  The moral of this story is that clients need to try to remember the documents they signed before their divorce is over.  And even then, old agreements can linger even after a judicial decree states that all rights…

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…

Defined benefit pensions, the ones that payout monthly, are strange animals.  They are rare today except where unions and public agencies are found, and they can produce some odd results.

Carl Jagnow married his wife Sharon in 1983.  They both taught school and both participated in the Public-School Employment Retirement System (PSERS).  Husband retired in…

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…