Depending on how invested you are in the topic, you may have heard of a recent movie called “Divorce Corp,” which tries to paint the divorce industry as some mega-corporate billion dollar industry, all controlled via puppet strings by rich judges and lawyers. According to the filmmakers, the only way to improve things is to streamline the divorce process by eliminating unnecessary laws, and trying to fit everyone under one rule.
There are a few crucial things that the filmmakers either ignored or didn’t notice, however. The divorce process can certainly be quite complex, but that is not as a result of judges and lawyers trying to exert control. The divorce process is complex because often times the concept of divorce itself is complex. The issues of how a couple who has quite literally shared their entire lives with one another for 25 years splits evenly will never conform to a cookie-cutter approach.
If you were to ask a lawyer what the most important approach to a divorce is, they would undoubtedly tell you to stay calm and do everything possible to resolve things peacefully with your spouse. If you and your significant other are involved in actually resolving the issue rather than turning it into a fight, you can control most of the entire process and get it over rather quickly, rather than leaving it in the hands of a judge and drawing it out.
That is not always possible, though. Sometimes the other person is not interested in helping resolve things, sometimes they have unrealistic expectations about how things will unfold, and sometimes they are merely doing whatever they can to inflict pain on their spouse.
In situations like that and a hundred more, judges need to be able to have full control over what happens next, and streamlining the divorce process by gutting it and removing a large number of laws and regulations is only going to reduce their control.
Take the laws of alimony, for example. A young recently-married couple who has been married for 6 months should absolutely not be treated the same as a couple who has been married for 20 years, with the wife having given up a promising career to raise a family. Many individuals behind divorce reform would have you believe that similar laws can apply in both instances.
While the divorce system can certainly be overly complex in certain scenarios, it was set up the way it is in order to protect citizens. If the laws are drastically changed, then the potential for future disaster is high.