California Style

American law permits divorce, but reluctantly. It is a deeply rooted Western tradition that the partners must be somehow punished for ending a marriage. Hence the squalid court fights, private detectives with strobe guns, ruinously expensive lawyers' fees and the weeks at Reno dude ranches. A quarter of American marriages end in divorce, and most of the divorces are doubly bitter because of the judicial process that formally pits the parting husband and wife against each other.

Now California, the Western continental edge where the nation's future is said to lie, has adopted a divorce reform law that permits a couple to terminate their marriage almost on demand. No longer must cruelty, adultery, desertion or neglect be proved. If either husband or wife claims that "irreconcilable differences" exist and if the judge concurs, he can grant a divorce --or rather, in a terminology designed to eliminate the suggestion of angry separation--he can declare the marriage dissolved. Requiring a residency of six months, and an added six-month waiting period, the new law will principally benefit the 20 million Californians, rather than turn the state into a new Reno or Juarez. It should also relieve some children of future poisonous memories of their parents' parting.

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