The news agencies have been publishing stories about the NJ teen who is suing her parents for support. She doesn’t like their house rules so she has moved out but still wants to go to college on their dime. Click here. The interesting thing about this case is not the idea of suing your parents, it is the fact that she could win this suit if her parents were divorced. Several NJ family law attorneys have suggested that divorced parents are regularly required to pay college costs while parents who are not divorced are not. The idea is that parents who are not divorced would support their children and it is unfair to children of divorce to let their divorced parents off the hook. The children didn’t do anything, after all. Click here. Bari Weinberger, a prominent NJ divorce attorney, says that there is very little precedent supporting what the daughter of these non-divorced parents wants.
Compare this with a recent case in which a father who agreed in the property agreement to support his estranged daughter through law school, apparently thinking that she would go to a less expensive school like Rutgers law. He now has to come up with $112,000 so she can go to pricey Cornell.
