California Divorce Law Research Project, 1968-1977

The purpose of this study was to examine the social, economic and legal consequences of the no-fault divorce law, which permits filing for divorce without proving adultery, mental cruelty, or other such grounds. All participants were from California and were selected from three constituencies: attorneys, judges, and divorced individuals. The sample of judges consisted of 18 San Francisco and 26 Los Angeles Superior Court judges assigned to divorce cases in 1975, representing 90% and 96% of these populations respectively. The sample of attorneys consisted of 77 men and women from the San Francisco Bay Area and 92 men and women from Los Angeles. The sample of divorced individuals included 114 men and 114 women from Los Angeles who were selected from a random sample of individuals who divorced between May and July 1977. This sample was stratified and evenly distributed according to length of marriage and SES, with intentional oversampling of individuals from long marriages and with high SES. All participants were asked to evaluate three hypothetical divorce cases. They were also asked about their opinions and experiences of the no-fault divorce law, court proceedings, financial and property settlements, child custody, and lawyer-client relations. The interviews for the three different samples were not identical, but were similar in content, and ranged in length from 90 pages for the attorneys to 148 pages for the divorced individuals. Court dockets were also collected as part of this study. Five hundred were collected from Los Angeles and 500 from San Francisco in 1968, 2 years before the no-fault law was constituted. An additional 500 from each city were collected in 1972, and 500 more from Los Angeles in 1977. The Murray Research Archive holds most original record paper interviews with judges, attorneys and divorced men and women. The archival collection also includes numeric file data from 92 Los Angeles attorneys, and all 228 divorced men and women; and 1977 court dockets, and a numeric file data generated from recoding of a subset of original record paper data by Dr. Richard Peterson. Earlier court dockets are not included in the collection