Total Divorce Blog

In California you very rarely hear of a divorce for any other reason than “irreconcilable differences”.  Did you ever wonder why?

California is a no-fault divorce state.  Many states now have no-fault divorce laws which enable the parties to not engage in a battle over who caused the divorce.  In many cases this makes the process a lot quicker and much cheaper as well.  Neither party has to dig dirt on the other to prove anything.  They simply agree that they want to end the marriage, get a divorce and then they can fight over other things such as property division, child custody and support.

New York is the only state which still in all cases requires someone to be at fault in order to grant a quick divorce.  This means costs such as private investigator and hourly attorney’s fees can really add up.  If neither party in a marriage can provide proof of fault such as adultery or abuse then the parties must first agree to a legal separation and then live apart for a year before the divorce can be granted. 

These stringent divorce laws often lead to the parties agreeing in private that one of them will take the blame, just so the divorce can be done quickly.

There has been legislation in New York to enable a quicker, no-fault divorce process, but it did not make it through the state senate to become law.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Divorce Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.