Characterizing Property

A CJER Online Self-Study Course

You must characterize property as community or separate in determining the rights and liabilities of parties in a family law proceeding. It is the first step to dividing property after dissolution or legal separation. This online course will give you the basic knowledge you need to characterize property.

This course is one in a series of online courses for family court bench officers. Other available courses are:

• Calendar Management in Family Court
• Custody and Visitation
• Determining Income
• Child and Spousal Support
• Dividing Property

These courses supplement CJER's live family law courses and benchguides.

Learning Goals

As a result of this course, you will be able to:

• Define the terms community, separate, and quasi-community property
• Explain what presumptions apply based on the title to property
• Determine the character of property based on when it was acquired
• Apply different methods of allocating earnings and profits between separate and community income based on sample facts
• Describe different methods of tracing sources of assets in commingled accounts
• Explain the Moore/Marsden rule and apply it to sample facts where community funds have been used on separate property
• Identify special rules that govern characterization of employment benefits
• Discuss how premarital and postnuptial agreements may transmute the character of property
• Explain the spouses' general fiduciary duties in managing community property

We estimate that the course will take approximately 1.5 hours to complete, depending on your experience.

This course contains various activities and quizzes. These are training exercises for your own practice only; no record is made of any of your responses to the course activities or quizzes.

Your feedback is important to us for the development of future courses. After finishing this course, please take a few minutes to complete the evaluation form. After completing the evaluation, you may print a certificate of completion. This course will help satisfy your continuing education needs.

Click on How to Use below or plunge directly into the course by clicking on any section title to the left, or simply click Next below.