Do you have a Living Will? Do you know what it says? If you have one, you probably think that you are saving your loved ones the burden of making a tough decision during tough times. That was certainly my intention when I signed mine. But have you considered that the Living Will could, in fact, be a danger to you and possibly cost you your life? This was not an issue I had ever considered, because I trusted the medical profession to understand the documents. I was very wrong to do that. I learned this week that the medical profession is very ignorant where Living Wills are concerned. 

            Some basic law is necessary to understand what a “Living Will” is designed to do. South Carolina has the “Death with Dignity Act”, which can be found in Title 44, Chapter 77, of the South Carolina Code of Laws.  This law allows a person, even while they are young and healthy, to draw up a document that tells doctors, at some abstract time in the future, that the person does not want to be kept alive by...

 

By M. J. Goodwin

www.mjgoodwin.com

 

 

            In 1977, recording artist Meatloaf recorded the album “Bat Out of Hell.” My favorite track from that album is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” If you carefully listen to the lyrics of that song, Meatloaf is teaching an important lesson. How, you may ask, can this possibly have anything to do with a legal column? Well, download that MP3 if you don’t already have it, stay with me a while and you’ll see.

 

            I practice about 80% of the time in family court and most of the rest of the time in criminal court. Of those family court cases, many involve questions of child custody, child maltreatment, child support, child visitation…all things child related.   The most difficult of these cases stem from the one-night-stand babies and the casual sex babies. In these situations, you have two people who do not even know one another, but who nevertheless had sex, trying to parent a child. Aside from the obvious...

 

By M. J. Goodwin

 

For 2010, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was Mark Zuckerberg, a young man who was born the year that I graduated from high school.  He is a 26 year old billionaire and the founder of FaceBook.  Now, if you don’t know what FaceBook is, I can’t imagine how you come to be reading a legal website blog.   But in the interest of clarity, I will say that FaceBook is a social networking site with so many members that  if it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world.  This mega-empire was founded in Zuckerberg’s college dorm room.  It is an electronic world.  

      I began law school in 1988.  At that time, though from a family considered fairly well off, I did not own a personal computer.  There were only three or four people in my law school class that owned computers at that time.  Computerized legal research was in its infancy and was very expensive.  Now, it is free through my SC Bar membership.

       When I went to work at the Anderson...

 

 

 

The Best Interest of the Child

By M. J. Goodwin

 

 

I spend about 85% of my professional life in the Family Court of South Carolina. Most of that time is spent on cases involving child custody or child abuse and neglect. The standard for determining which parent gets custody of a child is “what is in the best interest of the child?” Our Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that “in a custody dispute, the paramount and controlling factor is the welfare and best interest of the child“. What a slippery slope that can be. But it is better than the standards that we used to have. Way back, a long time ago, children were regarded as property and therefore, were usually awarded to the father. Of course, divorce was less prevalent then. But if it happened, the children went with the father. Sometimes that was good, sometimes it wasn’t. Later, as the “new” wisdom of the 1950s-70s came into vogue, the “Tender Years” doctrine was adopted, which stated that very young children were better off in the care of their mother. Well, that is not always the case either. So the law ultimately involved into where it is today, the best interest standard. The “best interest” is not defined anywhere in the code or the case law.

...

Written material from CLE presented on January 28, 2011 for the South Carolina Bar.

 

Conservative, Liberal, Progressive or American?