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Origins of No-Faut Divorce

I am distressed by the assumptions and errors in the USA history. The California Act of 1969 was not due to "disgust" by judges or lawyers, but due to the intense political pressure of political interest groups. The entire USA history, other than the identification of the 1969 origin, is hopelessly biased and POV.

Rex Judicata 19:15, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

I happened to be visiting one of the largest law libraries in the United States a month ago and browsed through several books about the no-fault divorce revolution. Some were published when it was happening in the 1970s and some were from later as well. All the sources agreed that the modern American no-fault divorce revolution arose from the fact that about 90 percent of American divorces were already uncontested by 1974 (that fact in particular comes from Michael Wheeler's book on No Fault Divorce published by Beacon Press in 1974).

Because unhappy spouses will always find ways to get what they want, the traditional legal fiction that divorce was an adversarial proceeding had already become hopelessly empty---it seems so archaic, but under the old system, a petitioner prosecuted a divorce.

Everyone was sick and tired of seeing ordinary people routinely perjure themselves under oath in what was becoming (and still is) one of the most common types of court proceeding. That's why no-fault divorce was inevitable. --Coolcaesar 22:00, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What exactly does Rex want in order for us to be able to remove the POV check? The article seems neutral to me. It would be good if he could state which interest groups he is referring to and source his claim that it was intense political pressure by political interest groups that created the 69 California Act. SqueakBox 01:02, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Why do liberals always feel a need to throw around the word "inevitable" with regard to any policy change they happen to favor? I think the use of this word is meant to stifle criticism of liberal policies by making the public feel it has no say in whatever matter is under discussion.

Okay, I did some more research on LexisNexis. The ONLY person who directly proposed a connection between Soviet no-fault divorce and modern no-fault divorce (which was the core of an earlier version of this Misplaced Pages article) is an ultraconservative professor named Lynn Wardle at the law school of Brigham Young University. He published his wild theory in a 2004 issue of the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy. Mary Ann Glendon, an ultraconservative professor at Harvard, also made some oblique references to the similarities in various articles over the years, but never argued the same idea as directly as Wardle.

Basically, Wardle's theory, as expressed on an earlier version of this page (see the page history to see what it looked out before I edited most of it out) is an extreme point of view that does not represent the viewpoint of the majority of experts on family law and violates Misplaced Pages's NPOV policy. --Coolcaesar 01:05, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Also, another problem with Rex Judicata's view is that he seems to think that no fault divorce pioneered unilateral divorce. It did not. Divorces at common law always had to be unilateral or they would not be granted. If a judge believed that the two spouses were cooperating to arrange what we would now call a mutually amicable divorce, he would not grant the divorce on the grounds that the case was collusive. This was part of the larger doctrine in adversarial systems of justice that the courts should try to refrain from deciding collusive cases --- where one party is deliberately submitting to a hostile judgment in favor of the other party, in order to achieve some mutually desired result for some long-term tactical purpose, which also happens to violate public policy.

In the case of divorce, what violated public policy was the idea that two spouses who did not love each other should be allowed to agree to a divorce. This violated the public policy that favored keeping together the family unit in order to ensure the proper upbringing of children and the stable management of the unit's property assets (as opposed to the chaos that resulted then, and still results now, from their division in divorce). These policies were thought to outweigh the individual interest of a given spouse in finding a new spouse they actually loved, and in not having to be subject to constant bickering (or domestic violence) every night. They also outweighed the interest of children in not having to endure the sound of their parents arguing (or even worse, beating each other up).

I find this contention spurious. The law did not require that such a couple continue to live together or have anything further to do with one another, only that it continue as husband and wife. It simply asserted that, where no party had violated the marital contract, the marital contract should be enforced.

Actually, it did require that they had to have some contact with one another, regardless of how mutually destructive that contact was. It used to be a felony punishable by fine and imprisonment in nearly all states for a man to abandon his wife and children and refuse to support them, and it is still is in a few states, like Massachusetts. Furthermore, your understanding of marriage as a contract is incomplete. The defense of recrimination, which was not abolished in most states until the 1950s, meant that where both spouses had violated the marital contract, then they were both at fault for the marriage not working and they could not obtain a divorce. See, e.g., De Burgh v. De Burgh, 39 Cal. 2d 858 (1952) (abolishing recrimination in California) . --Coolcaesar 05:42, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Divorces were acceptable only where one spouse had committed a sin so severe that it indicated the family unit had completely and irretrievably broken down, and even then the list of sins was tightly limited (and still is in certain states like New York). The point of no-fault divorce is that by removing the ground of fault, it removed divorce from the rule that lawsuits generally should not be collusive. --Coolcaesar 02:31, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Getting back to the original 'Russian Origin' complaint, how about we just change the text to show the Russian legal change as an early example of no-fault, and not cite it as an origin for the US No-Fault.--Fish-man 17:54, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Inclusion of Arguments Against No-Fault

Shouldn't this page contain more arguments against no-fault divorce, in order to bring it closer to a neutral point of view?

The problem is that most arguments commonly given today against no-fault divorce are really arguments against the availability of divorce of any kind. The risk is that if we returned to a fault regime, then people would simply go right back to lying in court, as was common in the mid-1960s. --Coolcaesar 7 July 2005 21:54 (UTC)

I think that's a vast overgeneralization. Some would argue that no-fault laws actually harm women by making possible unilateral divorce. Under a fault-based system, both parties to a divorce have to collude to obtain the divorce, which means that one party can threaten not to cooperate in order to obtain, say, a higher property settlement.

No, your understanding is still incorrect. Unilateral divorce already existed under the old system in the sense that a man could severely beat up his wife or flee the state forever or do some other downright mean act which would clearly indicate fault on his part. The problem is that most people wanted amicable or uncontested or bilateral divorces, in which they could separate their assets and arrange for joint custody without having to first destroy everything they had worked for and go to jail.

Second, your reasoning fails to deal with the problem of people colluding and lying in court, which was one of the fundamental reasons for switching to no-fault divorce. The basic problem is that common law courts lack the power to execute their own civil judgments. If every civil defendant tomorrow ignored all court judgments against them, then there would not be enough room in the jails to throw them all in for contempt. The system works only because the majority of people at any given time respect the power of the courts, and try to tell the truth when they're in the witness stand. If the majority of people came to believe that they could regularly get away with making affirmative misrepresentations under oath, then all testimony would become useless and the entire judicial process would break down. That's why perjury and obstruction of justice have always been crimes. --Coolcaesar 05:42, 17 July 2005 (UTC).

NPOV on Arguments Against No-fault Divorce?

I'm a little distressed that the article ends on this note: The "revolution" in no-fault divorce is now entering the third generation in some families, leaving children with parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents who have been divorced. According to Judith S. Wallerstein, director of the long-term study on the effects of divorce begun in the early 1970s, "divorce is a long-term crisis" which inflicts permanent psychological damage on children of divorce, who themselves are more likely to suffer failed marriages ("they don't have the template to follow") or even avoid marriage in order to avoid divorce. "A huge number are staying single."

The tone seems to imply a critique of divorce itself, which isn't substantiated. Does divorce cause certain behavior patterns or is it merely correlated with them? Is it possible that some of these problems would be worse if these couples stayed married? Basically--is divorce necessarily bad? For that matter, is staying single bad? The final quote seems to say so. It's incredibly difficult for anyone to make a simple value judgment on such a complicated issue, no matter how long they spend looking at the problem. If others agree, I'd like to see the issue treated in a more neutral manner. PoetrixViridis 22:41, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I have long disliked that ending too. There are several editors hostile to no-fault divorce who have persistently insisted on putting a non-neutral attitude to no-fault divorce into the article. I have been too busy with lawyer work and with taking other bad editors to arbitration (see what happened to User:Ericsaindon2) to take some of these editors through the time-consuming dispute resolution process. Although I contributed nearly all the sources in this article, my main focus right now is on keeping the vandals away from Lawyer and on fixing the Freeway v. Expressway mess (which has been a mess for 4 years now). --Coolcaesar 23:13, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Statistics source? Fact check!

Since the accuracy of the emancipation info is BAD (or VERY dated?) 18-21 is not accurate, voting rights are given to 18 year olds, they are full adults at that time (excepting alcohol)

Divorce rates percentage NEEDS to be accurately sourced, as far as I know the 1st marriage divorce rate is WELL below 50%, although it may be that high for people on subsequent marriages

Zotel - the Stub Maker 22:58, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Apparent POV and OR introduced by Michael H 34 in violation of NPOV

Michael H 34 is introducing his personal bias and original research into this article, which is a violation of several Misplaced Pages official policies including Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view, Misplaced Pages:No original research, and Misplaced Pages:What Misplaced Pages is not. He has inappropriately rewritten several sentences which I originally wrote, so that they now contain assertions not in the sources cited after those sentences. He also appears to be abysmally ignorant of the history of no-fault divorce as documented through the sources cited.

Please see the notice at User:Ericsaindon2 for what happened to the last user I encountered who persistently refused to bring his edits into compliance with Misplaced Pages official policies. First, Eric was banned from editing the Anaheim Hills article and then was banned completely for using sockpuppets to try to get around the ban. --Coolcaesar (talk) 22:51, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

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