Have you ever had to go through the pain of a divorce? My parents divorced when I was 5 and it was really hard for me. According to the EncartaEncyclopedia, Divorce, or dissolution, as it is increasingly becoming known, alegislatively created, judicially administered process that legally terminates amarriage no longer considered viable by one or both of the spouses and thatpermits both to remarry. Until the divorce reform movement of the 1970s beganto have an impact, the legal doctrines governing divorce could be understoodonly by reviewing the long history of English divorce law, which was dominatedby concepts of canon law. The first main point is the History of divorce. Before 1857 in GreatBritain, freedom to remarry could be obtained only by an act of Parliamentfollowing a separation decree given by a clerical court on the basis of somewrong (such as adultery or abandonment) done by the defendant to theplaintiff. This system, based on the premise that valid marriages may not bedissolved, reflected the Roman Catholic origins of English domestic-relationslaw. The early American colonists brought this fault-based system with them to the New World. Because they feared the moral dangersposed by a married yet separated state, they made it possible to obtain anabsolute divorce, but only on the traditional English grounds for separation.Basically, however, the conceptual and legal structure the marriage-dissolutionsystem remained as it had been created and maintained for a divorcelesssociety. Clerical courts were abolished in Great Britain in 1857, and absolutedivorce was then instituted. Incorporated into the law of absolute divorce werethe fault-based notions that had grown up around separation. These notionscontinued to affect British and American divorce law and administration formore than a century.The second main point is Divorce in the U.S. Because of the traditionalfault-based view of divorcethat the innocent and injured s...
