What’s wrong with the current concept of maintenance?
Maintenance in New York law is based on two false assumptions. First, when legislators passed New York’s current divorce law, they thought that the equitable distribution sections of the law would provide significant financial settlements. But equitable distribution is about dividing existing assets, and most couples divorcing in New York State have few assets to divide. They may have a small amount of equity in a home or a bit of money in a pension plan, but mostly they have marital debt. Even people with long marriages are likely to walk away from the equitable distribution of their property with very little. Second, current New York law assumes that all a spouse needs after a marriage — even a long marriage in which one spouse has spent years out of the workforce raising children, administering a household, and doing unpaid domestic labor — is a brief period of “rehabilitative” maintenance. Experience, backed by economic research, has proved this is just not true. Even a brief per
