Under New Jersey law, parents are required to support their children until they are emancipated. Parents may assume this means they must support their children until they are 18, but there actually is no specific age that triggers emancipation–a child becoming legally independent of his or her parents–in New Jersey. In many cases, children over the age of 18 are still reliant on their parents.

Therefore, in New Jersey child support obligations do not necessarily end when a child turns 18. However, a child support order or agreement may specify that support will terminate at age 18, for example, or that support will continue until the child completes his or her post-secondary education. Absent such a provision, it may be left up to a court to decide when child support obligations will end.

In a recent child support dispute, a New Jersey court ordered a father to pay for half of his daughter’s law school tuition. The man reportedly had agreed to do so years earlier when settling his divorce.

According to The Star-Ledger, the man and his now ex-wife negotiated the agreement when they divorced in 2009. The two agreed that they would split the tuition should their daughter attend law school and maintain a ‘C’ average or higher.

After the divorce became final, however, the father and daughter did not remain on good terms. He still told her that he would help pay for her to attend Rutgers Law School, provided she live at home, but she decided instead to go to Cornell–which carries a much larger price tag.

The father said he was not obligated to pay the $112,000 asked of him, maintaining that the divorce agreement implied he would not pay for law school in the case of estrangement. The court disagreed with him, and also found that the divorce agreement did not give him authority to decide which law school his daughter would attend.

This case is a reminder that New Jersey residents must craft their divorce settlements and child support agreements very carefully and intentionally in order to avoid future disputes.

Source: NJ.com, “NJ court orders divorced father to pay half of daughter’s pricey law school expenses,” Jeff Goldman, March 5, 2014