Divorce Law Reform Research Articles

Divorce law reforms and house prices in Europe

This study investigates the static and dynamic effects of legal reforms facilitating divorce on housing prices. Multiple mechanisms, such as variations in housing demand and supply, can be influenced by these law reforms. On the one hand, divorced individuals often require separate dwellings, thus increasing housing demand. On the other hand, an increase in supply is often precipitated by the divorcées needing to sell their married home. Detailed information was collected regarding the historical changes in divorce laws across ten European countries from 1960 to 2008. This data was combined with information from the annual Real House Price Index developed by Knoll et al. (Am Econ Rev 107:331–353, 2017). The study regards the divorce law reforms as providing a quasi-experimental setting. This is primarily because the entry timings of these reforms differ across countries and their target is not regulation of the housing market, but rather to simplify the dissolution of marriages. The study finds that divorce law reforms accounted for a substantial 22% of the average interannual increment in the Real House Price Index, particularly 3–6 years post reforms. Such a short-term, yet significant, impact was found to be consistent even after performing identification checks and including time-variant and invariant controls.

Divorce on grounds of discord: Did the Moroccan family law reform bring the guarantee of divorce for women? An ethnographic perspective on the changing landscape of divorce. The Mudawwana a decade on

Abstract This article discusses the new divorce on grounds of discord procedure (taṭlīq li-š-šiqāq) within the context of the Moroccan family law reform of 2004. Literature available in English and French has, so far, focused primarily on the improvements the Moroccan family law reform has brought in regard to women’s rights. The reform is considered one of the most progressive legislative projects in the MENA region and a milestone for gender equality, notably the reform of divorce law. Divorce on grounds of discord was seen as the long-awaited divorce guarantee for women. However, legal scholars maintained that case law jeopardised the divorce guarantee. This legal-anthropological study is informed by fieldwork at the family court in Rabat, as well as official statistics, case law and the standard legal commentary. It aims to scrutinise how divorce on grounds of divorce is put into practice by the judiciary, how Moroccan men and women make use of it and how changes on a procedural and institutional level affect the implementation of the new divorce procedure. My empirical findings show that divorce on grounds of discord effectively guarantees Moroccan women’s right to divorce. Well beyond the discussion on women’s rights in divorce, I will demonstrate that, within a decade, divorce on grounds of discord developed into a standard divorce procedure for both men and women across socio-economical milieus and age groups.

Introduction: The Interwar Woman Writer: Politics and Aesthetics

This special issue is prompted by a concern to probe the ways in which the claims of literary and political engagement were mutually constitutive for interwar women writers. These women lived through two rounds of electoral reform in 1918 and later in 1928, the opening up of the professions to some women through the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, the reform of divorce law in 1924 and 1937, as well as significant socio-political upheaval, including the first Labour government in 1924 and the 1926 General Strike. As they wrote novels, tracts and pamphlets, women writers assumed a wide range of official roles that were informed by the shifting political world in which they found themselves: Winifred Holtby was a member of the Six Point Group and Independent Labour Party; Sylvia Townsend Warner was a committed communist; Naomi Mitchison stood as Labour candidate for the Scottish Universities seat in 1935; Virginia Woolf had a life-long affiliation to the Women’s Co-operative Guild; Storm Jameson was a co-founder member of the Peace Pledge Union. The essays in this issue draw attention to the nuances of the political commitments of interwar women writers and their writing as a site of reflection on these commitments. The introduction situates this edited collection in terms of recent developments in modernist and middlebrow studies and provides summaries for the chapters that follow.

Protecting Privacy in Divorce Actions: Article 8 and the Need for Law Reform

This article makes the case for reform of divorce law by demonstrating that the current provisions in the Divorce (Scotland) Act 1976 are not compliant with Article 8 ECHR. Scots law's mix of fault and no fault provisions requires the mandatory disclosure of often highly personal and intimate details in order to establish adultery, behaviour, or non-cohabitation. This statutory requirement to disclose private and personal information to the state, to fulfil the test for irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, constitutes an invasion of the spouses’ privacy. The article then goes on to show that such invasion cannot be justified as necessary in a democratic society, in terms of Article 8 jurisprudence. Consequently, reform is required to ensure that Scots divorce law is ECHR compliant. The final section sets out a proposal to transform divorce law in Scotland into a no-fault notification procedure, removing the damaging and invasive process currently in force.

Divorce Reform in Canada: New Perspectives; An Analytical Review of Bill C-10 (Canada), 1984

Bill C-10 (Canada), 1984 is entitled An Act to Amend the Divorce Act (R.S.C., 1970, c. 10). In reality, however, the fundamental character of some of the changes proposed therein constitutes a major reform of substantive divorce law and provides a limited foundation for radical changes in the adversarial legal process. The concept of “no-fault” divorce that was proposed by the Law Reform Commission of Canada in its Working Papers and Report on Family Law constitutes the basis of Bill C-10 with regard to the freedom to divorce and the judicial determination of the right to and quantum of spousal maintenance. But Bill C-10 provides little by way of a framework for the implementation of the Law Commission's recommendations for new processes that would ameliorate the injurious effects of the adversarial legal process. For example, the use of mediation as an alternative to the litigation of disputed issues is endorsed in clauses 5 and 16 of Bill C-10, but these clauses, and particularly clause 5, are badly drafted and are unlikely to foster mediated settlements where either lawyer representing the parties is intent on a battle in open court. Bill C-10 introduces much-needed policy objectives to assist the courts in determining whether spousal maintenance should be ordered on the dissolution of the marriage. Here again, however, the drafting is less precise than might be considered appropriate. The “best interests of the child” is declared to be the paramount criterion in applications for the maintenance, custody, care and upbringing of children, but no specific guidelines are provided with respect to the factors that might be relevant to a determination of a child's best interests. Joint custody orders and third party orders are expressly permitted, but not expressly encouraged, by clause 10 of Bill C-10. The jurisdictional requirements of section 5 (1) of the Divorce Act, R.S.C. 1970, c. D-8 have been simplified by clause 3 of Bill C-10, which retains only the one year ordinary residence requirement. Corresponding adjustments have been made to section 6 of the Divorce Act, which governs the recognition of foreign divorce decrees. Bill C-10 (Canada), 1984 thus constitutes a blending of the old and new. Whether this blend produces vintage wine or vinegar is a matter of opinion.

The Greek Divorce Law Reform of 1983 and Its Impact on Homemakers: A Social and Economic Analysis

In 1983, Greek Family Law was radically amended on the basis of gender equality and divorce law was liberalized, with the introduction of no-fault divorce and divorce by mutual consent. We aim to assess the potentially wide-ranging effects of the new divorce law on the social and economic status of homemakers in traditional, long-duration marriages. We reviewed a sample of 500 reported judicial decisions on maintenance and postdivorce distribution of marital property, finding that the new gender-neutral statutes on maintenance fail to protect the interests of homemakers after divorce. We identify judicial attitudes that misconstrue formal gender equality for substantive equality as a determining factor for such negative outcomes. We propose a new reliance-based model for Greek alimony law and illustrate that reliance is the most effective legal formula for acknowledging the nonpecuniary contributions of homemakers. Our research further demonstrates that homemakers are disadvantaged by the postdivorce distribution of marital property. We identified a number of problems that seriously compromise a homemaker's chances of receiving a fair share of marital acquests. The most prominent among them is that Greek courts do not apply clear-cut standards in evaluating a homemaker's domestic services, thus attaching a low value to their contributions within marriage. Yet another problem is that intangible assets (like the husband's postdivorce income and his pension benefits) are not designated as divisible marital property. We conclude by arguing that the reform was overall socially effective; however, it had an unintended negative impact on divorced homemakers. First, because the legislators did not include any special provisions on homemakers. Second, because judges have generally interpreted the new statutes as if men and women are always equal on divorce, and further, as if all women are similarly situated. To remedy these after-effects, we make specific proposals for future amendments. The central idea underlying these proposals is that divorce should be made more difficult for married couples with children. Lastly, we consider a number of measures that Greek policymakers can adopt in view of protecting divorced women and their children, while at the same promoting the social value of intact families. [This is an unpublished doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Chicago and supervised by Prof. Gary S. Becker, Judge Richard A. Posner and Prof. Mary A. Becker]

John Stuart Mill on matrimonial property and divorce law reform

John Stuart Mill on matrimonial property and divorce law reform

The Spectacle of Divorce Law in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock

The article examines the way Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934) and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock (1934) express popular dissent against the divorce laws of England in the 1930s. These novels satirized the legal process of obtaining a divorce as farcical and tainted by parties colluding to stage “hotel divorces” in order to satisfy the single-fault ground of adultery. This article argues that these novels helped to articulate widespread opposition towards the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which only allowed divorce to be granted for adultery alone. The writings also spurred parliamentary debate and ultimately paved the way forward for the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937. Herbert played a unique part in the campaign for divorce law reform. Both as a novelist and as a parliamentarian, Herbert composed legal satires and successfully introduced the Divorce Bill into the British Parliament respectively.

The Rise in Divorce and Cohabitation: Is There a Link?

Over the past decades, divorce and cohabitation have increased dramatically throughout Europe. Divorce has fundamentally altered the institution of marriage from a life-long union to one that may dissolve. Cohabitation allows couples to live together without undertaking the vows of marriage, but also allows couples to avoid the potentially higher costs of divorce. Thus, divorce and cohabitation seem to be intrinsically linked. Here we theorize how the increase in divorce may be linked to the increase in cohabitation on the macro-, meso-, and micro- levels. Using focus group data from 8 countries, we explore how divorce may have changed attitudes and beliefs concerning marriage and cohabitation. We then investigate whether survey data and official statistics in 16 countries provide evidence consistent with a link. While exogenous factors have been important for the increase in cohabitation, we argue that the divorce revolution has been a catalyst for the cohabitation boom.

Women's emancipation through education: A macroeconomic analysis

We study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage in light of changing divorce laws during the 1970s. We build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance in divorce. In the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women. Further, results suggest a higher insurance value of education in divorce than marriage market signaling benefits of education especially for women post divorce reform.

DIVORCE LAW REFORMS AND DIVORCE RATES IN THE USA: AN INTERACTIVE FIXED‐EFFECTS APPROACH

SUMMARYThis paper estimates the effects of unilateral divorce laws on divorce rates in the USA from a panel of state‐level divorce rates. We use the interactive fixed‐effects model to address the issue of endogeneity due to the association between cross‐state unobserved heterogeneity and divorce law reforms. We document that earlier studies in the literature do not fully control for unobserved heterogeneity and result in mixed empirical evidence on the effects of divorce law reforms. While reconciling these conflicting results, our results suggest that divorce law reforms have temporal positive effects on divorce rates, thus confirming the 2006 findings of Wolfers. Via simulation experiments, we assess the degree to which faulty inclusion or faulty exclusion of interactive fixed effects affects the policy effect estimators. Our results suggest that faulty inclusion only results in efficiency loss whereas faulty exclusion causes bias. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Women's Emancipation Through Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis

In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.

Law and the Power of Feminism: How Marriage Lost its Power to Oppress Women

In Feminism and the Power of Law Carol Smart argued that feminists should use non-legal strategies rather than looking to law to bring about women’s liberation. This article seeks to demonstrate that, as far as marriage is concerned, she was right. Statistics and contemporary commentary show how marriage, once the ultimate and only acceptable status for women, has declined in social significance to such an extent that today it is a mere lifestyle choice. This is due to many factors, including the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, improved education and job opportunities for women, and divorce law reform, but the catalyst for change was the feminist critique that called for the abandonment (rather than the reform) of the institution and made the unmarried state possible for women. I conclude that this loss of significance has been more beneficial to British women in terms of the possibility of ‘liberation’ than appeals for legal change and recognition, and that we should continue to be wary of looking to law to solve women’s problems.

Breaks in the breaks: An analysis of divorce rates in Europe

This paper explores the frequency of permanent shocks in divorce rates for 16 European countries during the period 1930–2006. We examine whether the divorce rate is a stationary series, exhibits a unit root, or is stationary around a process subject to structural breaks. A clear finding from this analysis is that not all shocks have transitory effects on the divorce rate. Our results provide evidence of both stationarity around occasional shocks that have permanent effects, and of a unit root, where all shocks have a permanent effect on the divorce rate. All of the permanent shocks are positive, and most are grouped in the 1970s. These shocks can be related to major events that occurred throughout Europe at that time: the divorce law reforms, suggesting that those policies play an important role in the movement of European divorce rates.

Die österreichische Scheidungsreform in den 1970er Jahren

In Austria during the 1970s extensive reforms in the area of family law were passed. These reforms were adopted unanimously in parliament with one exception. The reform of divorce law, which was carried out in 1978 by the implementation of two new laws, only partly was decided by common agreement. While the new possibility of di- vorce by consent was introduced with the votes of all parties, the new regulations on divorce against the will of the blameless spouse, led not only to the end of consent in parliament. It also evoked protest of the Catholic Church and the Social Democratic Women. The article provides an overview on the historical development of divorce law in Austria until 1945 and the reform process in the Second Republic with a focus on the social and political negotia- tions in the 1970s.

Religion and Attitudes Toward Divorce Laws Among U.S. Adults

This study examines religious differences in attitudes toward divorce laws among U.S. adults. Using pooled data from the 2000-2006 NORC General Social Surveys ( N = 5,683), we find that frequency of religious attendance and belief that the Bible is the Word of God are strong predictors of support for stricter laws governing divorce. Indeed, these religious indicators are much more important than conservative affiliation. Conversely, more secular individuals, that is, those who do not attend religious services and consider the Bible only a book of fables and moral teachings, are substantially less supportive of tightening existing divorce laws. Understanding the role of religion in shaping Americans’ attitudes toward divorce laws can illuminate the scope and boundaries of connections between the institutions of marriage and religion in the contemporary United States as well as inform policy implications for the future of divorce law reform.

The Impact of Unilateral Divorce on Crime

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of unilateral divorce on crime. First, using crime rates from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report program for the period 1965-1998 and differences in the timing in the introduction of the reform, we find that unilateral divorce has a positive impact on violent crime rates, with an 8% to 12% average increase for the period under consideration. Second, arrest data not only confirms the findings of a positive impact on violent crime but also shows that this impact is concentrated among those age groups (15 to 24) that are more likely to engage in these type of offenses. Specifically, for the age group 15-19, we observe an average impact over the period under analysis of 40% and 36% for murder and aggravated assault arrest rates, respectively. Disaggregating total arrest rates by race, we find that the effects are driven by the Black sub-sample. Third, using the age at the time of the divorce law reform as a second source of variation to analyze age-specific arrest rates we confirm the positive impact on the different types of violent crime as well as a positive impact for property crime rates, controlling for all confounding factors that may operate at the state-year, state age or age-year level. The results for murder arrests and for homicide rates (Supplemental Homicide Report) for the 15-24 age groups are robust with respect to specifications and specifically those that include year-state and year-age dummies. The magnitude goes from 15% to 40% depending on the specification and the age at the time of the reform.

English Cosmopolitanism and/as Nationalism: The Great Exhibition, the Mid-Victorian Divorce Law Reform, and Brontë'sVillette

In Vashti, central chapter in Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette (1853), combination of circumstances leads the narrator, Lucy Snowe, to Con tinental hotel. Lucy, an teacher in the imaginary kingdom of La bassecour, and Dr. John Graham Bretton, fellow expatriate, are taken to a suite of very handsome apartments in the Hotel Crecy on the Rue Crecy and shown into ua drawing-room whose hearth glow[s] with an fire, and whose walls [gleam] with foreign mirrors.1 The contrast between the welcoming warmth of the English fire and the cold gleam of the non-English mirrors appears to uphold the ideology of home?that most cherished of institutions?as evidence of national difference.2 Moreover, the very name of the hotel and the street suggests that some kind of measuring of forces is taking place: both are named after the Battle of Crecy (1346), the second great battle of the Hundred Years' War, in which small army ensured dominion over northern France. Bronte, writing soon after the Great Exhibition of 1851, could be evoking the batde in order to refer mockingly to the peacetime struggle for industrial and cultural dominance waged under the roof of the Crystal Palace. Indeed, the scene in the Hotel Crecy (as well as several other scenes in the novel permeated by exhibition-induced imagery) relies on the widely used metaphor of the mirror, which the Crystal Palace embodied: the palace encouraged many to view it as

Do Divorce Law Reforms Matter for Divorce Rates? Evidence from Portugal

The effect of divorce law reforms on divorce rates in the United States and elsewhere has generated a controversy in the law and economics literature. In this article, we study the contribution of divorce law reforms for the evolution of divorce rates in Portugal over the last 40 years. We focus on the reforms of divorce law in the 1970s and in the 1990s as well as socioeconomic factors as determinants of the divorce rate. We find that the introduction of a modern divorce law in the 1970s had a significant effect on the divorce rate, but the changes of the 1990s that effectively implemented a generalized no‐fault regime had no statistically significant impact. Our observations suggest that the reforms in the 1990s were likely the response of the legislature to growing divorce rates rather than the cause.

Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress

Over the past thirty years changes in divorce law have significantly increased access to divorce. The different timing of divorce law reform across states provides a useful quasi-experiment with which to examine the effects of this change. We analyze state panel data to estimate changes in suicide, domestic violence, and spousal murder rates arising from the change in divorce law. Suicide rates are used as a quantifiable measure of wellbeing, albeit one that focuses on the extreme lower tail of the distribution. We find a large, statistically significant, and econometrically robust decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce. No significant effect is found for men. Domestic violence is analyzed using data on both family conflict resolution and intimate homicide rates. The results indicate a large decline in domestic violence for both men and women in states that adopted unilateral divorce. We find suggestive evidence that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners, while the data revealed no discernible effects for men murdered. In sum, we find strong evidence that legal institutions have profound real effects on outcomes within families.