Divorce Procedure: New Orleans and Lafourche Parish
It is not sufficient simply to know what Louisiana’s divorce laws are to get a divorce. It is very important to know what the unpublished local rules of court are in order to make sure that your local judge will grant you a divorce. These rules, however, generally make getting a divorce more difficult and more costly.
Divorce procedure according to the laws of Louisiana is fairly straightforward,
if you have already lived separate and apart for the amount of time required by law. A verified petition must be filed, often your spouse will execute a waiver of service, citation, all legal delays and notices, then a preliminary default is filed and signed by a judge, which is later confirmed by an attorney. This can all be done in less than a month.
Under Louisiana law, the above procedure (detailed in Louisiana Civil Code of Procedure Article 1703, subsection ‘e’) is all that is necessary to get an uncontested Article 103.1 divorce. Local, unwritten rules can delay your paperwork if not fully complied with as part of your procedure. Two examples of such deviations from the basic rules are New Orleans and Lafourche Parish.
New Orleans requires that your divorce petition be verified twice. This means that you file a petition accompanied by an affidavit stating that the allegations in the petition are true. After obtaining a waiver of service, a preliminary default is entered. Before filing to confirm the default, you must execute another verification stating that it continues to be the case that the allegations in the petition are still true. The reason for this is that judges in New Orleans wish to make sure that you are still entitled to a judgment ending your marriage prior to them granting you this ruling.
Lafourche Parish is far stranger. Judges in Lafourche, however, require that you produce two witnesses at a hearing that can attest to the fact that you have lived separate and apart for the requisite period of time. Their justification for this increased burden is to ensure that the court is not being defrauded.
In defense of courts that wish to make it more onerous for a divorce to be granted, courts find themselves facing a large docket of Family Law cases. Attorneys for many of the uncontested cases are trying to move these cases as fast as possible. Judges do not want to make a mistake and grant an erroneous judgment ending a couple’s marriage. Therefore, they put into place extra precautions to slow the process down a little bit and help to make sure that the applicants are in fact entitled to what they are seeking.
The negative to this approach by certain courts is that it makes more difficult for poorer people to move on with their lives. It takes far more effort to get multiple verifications of a petition. This is almost nothing compared with the burden and expense of having to hold a hearing, having witnesses appear, and taking testimony sufficient to satisfy a judge.
By placing burdens beyond what Louisiana state law requires to get a divorce, these local court rules make it more difficult to move on from a bad marriage. Whether the rules mean an additional verification or actually having a hearing and taking testimony, these rules add to the expense and difficulty.
The above material is intended for information purposes only. It is not intended as professional legal advice and should not be construed as such. Attorney Will Beaumont practices in New Orleans, La.
