April 5, 2008

News: how NOT to divide your property after trial.

Divorce usually involves a division of property. ORSĀ  107.107(1)(f) describes what kind of property can be divided by the court. The question of how property should be divided is tricky. Do you swap an asset of roughly equal value for another? How do you equalize the retirements? How do you divide the personal property? There are many good ways to accomplish a just and proper division. One really, really bad way caught my eye in a Reuters news feed. A Serb farmer, apparently unhappy with the court’s divorce ruling that his property be divided, went about physically cutting the property in half with a grinder. The hoes, the cattle scales, the sowing machine, all cut in half. The farmer was perplexed by what to do with the cow.

“I still haven’t decided how to split the cow,” he told the newspaper. “She should just say what she wants — the part with the horns or the part with the tail.”