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Divorce Rates and the Fault Requirement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Thomas B. Marvell
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Abstract

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No-fault divorce legislation fundamentally changed the formal legal requirements for divorce from grounds based on moral concerns to those showing that the marriage has broken down without attributing blame. The old laws, which required that the plaintiff be blameless and prove malfeasance by the spouse, would have greatly restricted the number of divorces if they had not been widely subverted through collusion and perjury. The no-fault legislation gives an opportunity to test whether the attempts to legislate morality had any impact on divorce rates. Many reformers and researchers have claimed that the fault provisions were so thoroughly subverted that their removal did not lead to more divorces. The present study explores the impact of no-fault laws in thirty-eight states by applying a time-series-cross-sectional design. When grouped into one variable the laws did increase divorces, but when individual laws are analyzed, only a minority, primarily in eastern states, evidence significant impacts. Finally, I argue that it is probably beyond the limits of feasible social science research to determine why some laws had impacts but others did not.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , 1989 , pp. 543 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I am grateful for the comments by Herbert Jacob, Barbara Miller, Carl Moody, Robert Willis, and the reviewers, all of which led to substantial revisions of this article.

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