Economic origins of the no-fault divorce revolution

Richard Posner argues that late twentieth-century divorce-law reform rendered marital relationships in the United States increasingly contractual in nature. Chief among such reforms was the no-fault divorce revolution: the widespread switch in states’ legal regimes from fault-based, mutual-consent divorce to no-fault based, unilateral divorce, which swept across America in the 1970s. While a growing literature considers the no-fault divorce revolution’s effects on divorce rates, almost no work considers its causes. Taking Posner’s observation as its starting point, this paper develops testable hypotheses relating to the potential origins of no-fault divorce reforms in the US.