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"  On May 1, 2006, 10 jurors silently filed out of a White Plains, New York, courtroom into a small, poorly lit conference room down the hall. After about an hour, the chamber door opened and the all-male group shuffled back in. A 37-year-old blond in classic dress pants and a crisp white blouse, her hair pulled tight into a low ponytail, leaned in to her attorney and whispered, &amp;quot;Is a quick decision a good sign or a bad one?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;A good one,&amp;quot; he reassured.  The foreman gave his verdict. The Westchester County Supreme Court officially denied Dana Godner a divorce.  Earlier, before the judge had excused the jury to deliberate, he turned to the group and issued this stern instruction: &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#039;t matter if you deem this a deadbeat marriage or a loveless marriage,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;The only thing that matters is: Are there grounds [for divorce]?&amp;quot; He then listed the four legally sanctioned grounds in New York, one of only three states that do not confer unilateral or one-party divorce (the others are Mississippi and Tennessee) and the only state that doesn&amp;#039;t provide a &amp;quot;no-fault&amp;quot; ground (i.e., irreconcilable differences). Rather, one must be able to prove one&amp;#039;s spouse guilty either of &amp;quot;cruel and inhuman&amp;quot; treatment, adultery, abandonment for one year, or having spent at least three years in prison. The only exception is if a couple mutually consents to the divorce and all financial and custody terms, which in acrimonious, contested situations\u2014about one fourth of cases\u2014just does not happen. In this instance, Godner was suing to leave her husband of 13 years, Michael Godner, for cruel and inhuman treatment, which must meet a standard of abuse that &amp;quot;renders it unsafe or improper&amp;quot; for a couple to continue to cohabit. Clearly in the minds of these jurors, her husband&amp;#039;s behavior just wasn&amp;#039;t bad enough.  After crying her eyes out on the courtroom&amp;#039;s back steps, surrounded by her parents and lawyer, Godner climbed into her silver Range Rover and drove to her colonial-style home in the tony New York City suburb of Armonk. Michael, who had driven back from the courthouse separately, was in the kitchen with their three children. &amp;quot;Hey, how&amp;#039;s it going?&amp;#039; he asked when she walked in. On one level, this scene resembled many other evenings in the Godner household for the previous two years since Dana had first asked for a divorce: the children, ages five to 10, tiptoeing around their parents&amp;#039; chilly conversation; Dana cooking dinner for herself and the kids (and tossing the leftovers down the disposal when she heard the key in the door), then retiring to bed separately in the guest room. This evening&amp;#039;s pleasantries, however, followed 15-plus hours of searing court testimony over two weeks, in which Dana, an affable soccer mom, tried to prove to 10 strangers that her husband, the CFO of a $14 billion investment firm, was a controlling bully and their marriage &amp;quot;empty,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;demeaning,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the farthest thing from a partnership.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, she couldn&amp;#039;t garner any female sympathy, as almost every one of the women screened for the jury said they would never send a woman back to her husband against her will\u2014effectively disqualifying them\u2014and the one woman who did get picked dropped out midtrial because of a family obligation. Michael, meanwhile, asserted he was a generous, attentive husband and dad. In his defense, he argued that Dana was well provided for\u2014spoiled, even\u2014and that their problems were the typical ebbs and flows of any longtime union. &amp;quot;Just look at her life\u2014help, money, vacations, a great house,&amp;quot; he testified. As evidence, Michael passed the jurors 31 birthday and anniversary cards Dana had written over the years, described the mink coat and diamond necklace he had bought her, and offered a photo of the two of them, arm in arm on a trip to Vermont. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t we look happy?&amp;quot; he asked.  The marriage, according to Dana, had unraveled slowly, though there were worrisome signs from the start. The couple had met in Manhattan when Dana was in her early twenties and working as a sales rep for a fashionable sportswear company. Michael was exactly the type she&amp;#039;d always thought she should marry\u2014a hard-nosed, sophisticated financier, seven years older and clearly going places. &amp;quot;I loved the way he yelled on the phone when he was doing business,&amp;quot; she recalls.  But their intense, three-month courtship\u2014fueled by weekend getaways and wine-filled evenings\u2014included regular blowouts and deep-freeze periods, usually, she says, over his emotional evasions. Underlying his behavior, Dana felt, was a lack of trust that could be traced to his parents&amp;#039; difficult divorce when he was a young child. Dana&amp;#039;s parents, meanwhile, who&amp;#039;d been married for more than 40 years, encouraged the couple to go to therapy, which they eventually did. In spring 1993, they had a black-tie wedding for 250 guests at the Mamaroneck Yacht Club.  After two years, the couple moved to Westchester, where Michael was raised, and Dana quit working, which they both wanted. Soon they had a son, followed two years later by a daughter. Michael was totally consumed with growing his investment business; Dana was focused on her new mommy role. Three years later, their third child, another boy, was born.  As sometimes happens to young parents, they began to share less and less. Michael was preoccupied with work and resented being pulled into household concerns. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t ask you to solve problems in my office,&amp;quot; Dana says he once snapped when she phoned to ask for help juggling the kids&amp;#039; schedules. Dana allowed Michael to take control of all family financial matters\u2014&amp;quot;I was an idiot,&amp;quot; she says now. Everyday expenses required his approval\u2014buying a rug, booking airline tickets, signing off on a contractor&amp;#039;s bill. Michael insisted on separate bank accounts and would replenish Dana&amp;#039;s monthly &amp;quot;allowance&amp;quot; on the first of the month. This was money she could spend on personal needs\u2014clothes, hair, tennis lessons. The only domain left to Dana was day-to-day care of the kids. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like he was the grown-up and I was the child,&amp;quot; she recalls.  This lack of collaboration seeped into their relationship. When they went to the movies on Saturday nights, they would often sit in different theaters, rarely agreeing on what sounded interesting, or even caring to. &amp;quot;We were the couple at the dinner party that everyone assumed was happy but always fought all the way home,&amp;quot; Dana says. When she brought up her feelings of loneliness, Michael didn&amp;#039;t seem to share them. Marriages could be graded like schoolwork, he&amp;#039;d say, according to Dana. There were A marriages, B marriages, and so on. Theirs was a C. &amp;quot;C is average,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d argue. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s nothing wrong with average.&amp;quot;  After three failed attempts at therapy, Dana gave up. She stopped informing him of her plans, getting his shirts when she was at the cleaners, or sharing her groceries, and essentially started living a separate life under the same roof. Many nights, she lay in bed debating whether to stay with Michael and forgo her hope for a true companion, or leave and reclaim her life.  Soon, however, Dana found an outlet that allowed her a little bit of both. The whole family knew Jacques DuToit, the 27-year-old, spiky-haired South African tennis pro at their club who gave all the kids lessons. The playful flirtation with the fit moms in their tennis skirts slipped into a different zone, and by 2004, Dana and DuToit were having an affair. Emboldened by her relationship, Dana escalated her demands for a divorce. &amp;quot;Michael was constantly yelling, `You leave, you leave without my money or my kids,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; she says.  Michael declined to be interviewed for this story, citing his desire to protect his children by not &amp;quot;publicizing a bitter divorce,&amp;quot; but offered this explanation for his stance: &amp;quot;Understanding that no law is perfect, and assuming a safe, nonviolent environment, laws that encourage families with children to remain intact are...in the children&amp;#039;s best interest and offer them the best opportunity to be successful, emotionally healthy adults. I firmly believe that it is far too easy to get divorced in this country and that parents need to put their children&amp;#039;s well-being above their personal needs and desires.&amp;quot; In virtually any other state, Dana would have been able to simply walk out of her marriage, a right we assume that Americans\u2014especially women, who initiate nearly two-thirds of divorces\u2014should inalienably possess in the twenty-first century, whether they&amp;#039;re in an awful marriage or one that&amp;#039;s just plain unfulfilling. &amp;quot;Five miles to freedom. Five miles to freedom,&amp;quot; Dana used to sing\u2014five miles being the distance from her house to the Connecticut border, a state that has a no-fault divorce law, where a spouse can quit a marriage without having to prove her partner guilty of any offense or gain his or her consent. But New York has held its conservative outlier stance on divorce for generations. Until 1966, adultery was the sole acceptable ground for a split\u2014and this was 80 years after the majority of states had significantly expanded their grounds to include cruelty, habitual drunkenness, willful abandonment, fraud, and impotence. Lawyers and academics attribute this stasis to New York&amp;#039;s legislature, which is largely Catholic (despite the state&amp;#039;s liberal reputation, most of the upstate counties are quite conservative) and notoriously sclerotic. A 2004 report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law criticized New York&amp;#039;s legislature as being the &amp;quot;most dysfunctional in the nation&amp;quot; on nearly every measure, including legislation enactment rates. Of 9,311 Assembly bills floated in 2007, 976 passed\u2014an anemic 10 percent (the national average is 28 percent).  Today, however, an energized group is finally pushing to modernize New York&amp;#039;s divorce law. A clear indication that the movement is gaining traction is the perky brunette in a candy-apple-red blazer who presided over the podium last October at a forum titled &amp;quot;The Need for No-Fault Divorce,&amp;quot; held at the elegant Association of the Bar of the City of New York building in Manhattan. The headliner was none other than Judge Judy, the doyenne of daytime courtroom drama. On this morning, Judith Sheindlin was addressing a promisingly full room of matrimonial attorneys, policy makers, academics, and journalists. &amp;quot;Any law that prescribes that people must live together if the marriage is broken is wrong,&amp;quot; Sheindlin says.  The roster also included a judge from New Jersey\u2014where no-fault divorce was adopted in 1971\u2014who argued that establishing fault before property and custody can be divided raises costs to the couple and drains limited court resources. And then there was the Honorable Sondra Miller, who bounded from the first class of women at Harvard Law School in 1953 to, eventually, a seat on New York&amp;#039;s Supreme Court and whose matrimonial law commission crisscrossed the state in 2004 gathering testimony that clearly recommended adopting a no-fault law, among other changes.  The theme running through all the presentations was the needless acrimony the fault system promotes by requiring that blame be assigned to one individual. Even in uncontested divorces, a couple must essentially demonize one partner as a cheater, abuser, or abandoner. So in contentious splits, blame is magnified\u2014and frequently hard to prove.  Underscoring this problem was a nervously delivered testimonial by Barbara Karlen Blitstein, an attractive 50-year-old mother of four, a Sotheby&amp;#039;s realtor, and a former Junior League and PTA member in another affluent New York suburb, who spent more than three years fighting to divorce her husband of 22 years. For a decade and a half, the pair had been solid partners, two corporate professionals supporting one another through their early careers, hers in corporate sales, his as a financial executive, and sharing their love of classical music. But after she made the difficult decision to quit working when she became pregnant with her second child\u2014and then had twins soon thereafter\u2014and he had a career demotion followed by a painful job loss, their lives totally unraveled.  Bruised by his experiences, Blitstein&amp;#039;s husband decided to forgo paid employment and instead pursued a risky business venture, burning through their savings and borrowing thousands more from her parents. With his mounting failure, she told the group, he grew increasingly reclusive, lashing out at Blitstein when she suggested ways for him to reenter the workforce. When Blitstein finally sued for divorce, her husband had been acting depressed and hadn&amp;#039;t earned money in nearly seven years. She was then forced to spend more than $200,000 to prove her right to divorce him. Even under the circumstances, establishing cruel and inhuman treatment wasn&amp;#039;t easy: Lack of financial support isn&amp;#039;t grounds for divorce and without a psychiatric evaluation, she couldn&amp;#039;t offer a professional diagnosis of depression. &amp;quot;Anything good you had is destroyed, and you&amp;#039;re forced to focus only on the horrible things to prove your case,&amp;quot; Blitstein says remorsefully. While she ultimately won a divorce, it required a devastating battle in which the kids took different sides (though all ended up living with her).  Indeed, several speakers stressed that the ultimate victims of the character assassinations and vindictive behavior that ensue are the kids. JoAnne Pedro-Carroll, PhD, a University of Rochester psychologist who specializes in family breakups, argued that a key determinant in how kids fare is the level of hostility during and after a divorce, not just preceding it\u2014a problem exacerbated by fault.  Of New York&amp;#039;s 60,756 divorces filed in 2007, just under one fourth were contested by a spouse, and of those cases, an estimated seven to 10 percent were contested on the issue of fault (financial or custody fights are typical). But there are still countless stories each year of wives and husbands needlessly, helplessly trapped in dead marriages. In Gross v. Gross last summer, an Upper West Side Manhattan woman was denied a  divorce despite testifying that her husband of 37 years &amp;quot;had physically forced himself on her sexually&amp;quot; and had &amp;quot;grabbed her, pulled at her, thrown her on the bed, and pushed her against the wall.&amp;quot; The judge&amp;#039;s decision notes that she did not sustain any injuries as a result of the incident and cites the lack of medical evidence as &amp;quot;particularly telling.&amp;quot; In 2005 there was the &amp;quot;Viagra case,&amp;quot; in which a Westchester woman claimed that she and her husband had not had sex for a year despite her repeated overtures\u2014one definition of the abandonment ground\u2014but when her husband presented in court a Viagra vial with two missing pills, the divorce was denied.  Matrimonial attorneys warn their clients of the difficulty of pursuing the cruelty ground, citing instances of menacing, even pathological-seeming behavior that have failed to meet the requirement. In fact, the strict interpretation of emotional abuse that seems to prevail in court, resting on evidence of mental illness, sets a far higher standard than the often subtle and insidious nature of psychological abuse. For instance, there&amp;#039;s the 2004 Queens, New York, case of a husband, a photographer, threatening his wife of 30 years, a teacher, that if she bought a car against his wishes, he would cut up their furniture with a chain saw. Despite her claims of suicidal thoughts, amid allegations that he ransacked their home, urinated on her car, and repeatedly verbally attacked her, she was denied a divorce. The longer the marriage, the more difficult it becomes to prove fault, and without medical proof of her depression, she was unable to establish that the abuse made it unsafe to stay.  These desperate battles cross all socioeconomic groups. A machine-repair specialist in upstate New York is still married to a man she has not lived with since 1997 and has been trying to divorce for 11 years. But because of their legal status, she was forced to declare bankruptcy to pay off the debts for his failed business. Only recently was she able to get his name off the title to her home, though he still has claims on her 401(k) and pension.  Another major critique levied at New York&amp;#039;s law is the significant amount of money being spent to fight over fault. Even in cases that eventually settle, a protracted grounds dispute between two Manhattan professionals typically costs the filing spouse $20,000 to $40,000. In cases also involving custody and financial disagreements, the bill can easily soar to five times that amount. The high cost to both warring parties is particularly ironic given that the majority of fault disputes are financially motivated.  Dana and Michael&amp;#039;s split was no exception. Without any immediate job prospects\u2014and since, arguably, her decision to stay home allowed Michael to focus on building his company\u2014Dana sought an equitable settlement. However, the court only offers guidelines for determining what&amp;#039;s equitable\u2014prescribing that the judge weigh  issues such as need, the predivorce living standard, and each spouse&amp;#039;s contribution to attaining a particular asset\u2014but no calculus for fairness. In August 2005, Dana finally hired a lawyer, paying a $20,000 up-front retainer (for once not bothering to run the expense by Michael). Finally, recognizing that his wife was serious, Michael floated a separation proposal, which Dana&amp;#039;s lawyer tossed aside, claiming it wasn&amp;#039;t close to a fair share of their property and assets (there was no asset-review process, making the total hard to estimate). The custody arrangement Michael offered was half time with each parent.  It was the custody offer that was hardest for Dana to swallow. The thought of leaving her kids half the time with her husband, who spent roughly a week of every month out of town and often worked until 9 p.m., was unbearable. Plus, although Michael was a good weekend dad, she claimed he had never driven a carpool or taken the kids to the doctor. She thought that if a judge reviewed their case, he would never order an equal split. &amp;quot;I had to roll the dice. What choice did I have?&amp;quot; she said.  Many attending the half-day forum must have had a strong sense of d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu, as a similar push to amend New York&amp;#039;s divorce law occurred in 1989. That time, the effort was initiated by Republican Senator Michael Tully, who allegedly was seeking a divorce from his unwilling wife. His bill passed the Senate but languished in the Assembly. The opposition groups that killed the bill are the same ones fighting the change today.  Leading the charge, rather unexpectedly, is the New York Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYS), the same group, in fact, that responded to Senator Kennedy&amp;#039;s late January endorsement of Barack Obama with a press release headlined &amp;quot;Senator Kennedy Betrays Women.&amp;quot; The stalwart feminist organization launched by Betty Freidan in the late &amp;#039;60s promoting equal rights for women finds itself allied with profamily and Catholic organizations. New York NOW&amp;#039;s stance on no-fault divorce flows from its overarching mission: &amp;quot;Improving women&amp;#039;s economic status is the primary lens through which we look at issues,&amp;quot; says chapter president Marcia Pappas when we speak on the phone after the no-fault forum. Incidentally, she was annoyed that she had not been offered a turn at the podium. &amp;quot;I sort of assumed we were invited there to state our position.&amp;quot; (Interestingly, NOW chapters in a number of other states have fought on the opposite side of the debate.)  The New York group&amp;#039;s lobbying efforts are focused on combating the drop in economic status that women tend to suffer in divorce. Topping its agenda is an amendment to guarantee the nonmoneyed spouse equal access to a lawyer or legal fees. Pappas says she sees too many cases in which a woman who can&amp;#039;t afford an attorney is forced to wage a court battle against a big-gun litigator. They also ally with some domestic violence groups in calling for standardized spousal maintenance awards\u2014the modern term for alimony. Currently, there&amp;#039;s no standard based on a percentage of income or expenses. Rather, there are guidelines (as for equitable distribution) taking into account need, length of the marriage, lost and future earning capacity\u2014and a great deal left to the judge&amp;#039;s interpretation. &amp;quot;Judges are an old boys&amp;#039; club. It&amp;#039;s so obvious,&amp;quot; Pappas says. &amp;quot;Why would we want to put a woman&amp;#039;s future in the hands of the court?&amp;quot;  The family law reforms that NOW-NYS is seeking go well beyond what most any other state has enacted. Pappas has no intention of giving up the stick\u2014denying a divorce\u2014that some women wield to extract better economic terms until adequate protective measures are enacted. But given that studies estimate that no more than 10 percent of women, most typically wealthier ones, receive any spousal support to bargain over, and that low-income couples rarely even hire lawyers, critics accuse NOW&amp;#039;s platform of primarily benefiting nonworking, well-off wives\u2014much like Dana. Pappas assures me that she isn&amp;#039;t taking a moral position, nor is she advocating for bad marriages to continue. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re just saying that we want women to get a fair shake when divorce happens.&amp;quot; As for cases like Dana&amp;#039;s, she admits, &amp;quot;My heart breaks for those women.&amp;quot;  The original intent of the no-fault law, according to Herma Hill Kay, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, who helped draft the 1969 legislation that made California the no-fault frontier, was to combat the way in which the law promotes extortion. &amp;quot;We were trying to do away with blackmail&amp;quot;\u2014which is what NOW is trying to keep, Kay explains, occasionally shuffling across her book-stuffed office to consult a legal text. In cases where fault was lacking, the right to divorce was withheld for financial gain. Fabricating fault where it didn&amp;#039;t exist was\u2014and remains\u2014an even more common form of misuse of this law. An infamous story from New York was &amp;quot;the other woman&amp;quot; in a pile of adultery claims who was revealed to be the secretary of a leading divorce attorney.  Prior to the shift that began in California, there had been almost no real change in U.S. divorce law since just after the American Revolution, when divorce went from being largely not permissible to being allowed in cases of adultery, abandonment, neglect, and cruelty. In spite of the strict laws, however, and clear evidence of mass perjury, by 1964 divorce had become a cultural norm, with the rate of splits hitting 36 percent, up from about 5 percent following the Civil War. When then\u2013California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Family Law Act in 1970, it set a no-fault divorce reform train rolling clear across the country. By 1985, 48 states had adopted no-fault. Because the move largely represented the law coming into line with the existing culture, the mass adoption occurred with little dissent or fanfare.  Ready acceptance of the new law, however, didn&amp;#039;t last. In 1985, Stanford sociology professor Lenore Weitzman published a jarring statistic in her book The Divorce Revolution: A woman&amp;#039;s standard of living plummets 73 percent in the year following a divorce, while a man&amp;#039;s increases by 42 percent\u2014based on data from over 228 California divorce cases in 1977\u201378. Weitzman&amp;#039;s work, and that of subsequent researchers, ascribes the difference to women&amp;#039;s lower earning power coupled with their disproportionate financial responsibility for kids, who, overwhelmingly, live with their mothers. Men, conversely, lower their costs, even after making support payments (if they do), yet maintain higher incomes. Weitzman blamed the loss in bargaining power under no-fault law for women&amp;#039;s financial hardship.  Weitzman&amp;#039;s book incited a backlash, and legislative task forces sprung up to examine the fallout of the so-called divorce revolution. Studies tagged the lenient law with driving up the divorce rate, which between 1960 and 1985 more than doubled from 2.2 per thousand people to five per thousand. Academics who began studying the economics of divorce similarly concluded that women were not faring well. Only a handful of studies (including Weitzman&amp;#039;s), however, has ever looked at the role of the no-fault law specifically in creating the economic disparity, and the scant work was inconclusive\u2014some finding awards to women in no-fault states to be smaller than those in fault states, others finding no difference. In almost every instance, the data sets were small and incomplete, a challenge that hampers divorce research overall. Surveys indicated too that couples have minimal assets to bargain over\u2014$7,800 was the median in one large Wisconsin study. Nonetheless, with the high divorce rate and conservatives banging the promarriage drum, furor swirled.  Adding to the noise, in 1996, Weitzman&amp;#039;s landmark finding was blown apart. Richard R. Peterson, a sociologist at the Social Science Research Council in New York, discredited her statistical method and reported that the magnitude of the problem was nowhere near what she asserted. His analysis of her work cited a 27 percent decline in living standard for women and 10 percent increase for men, which is where the consensus sits today, though estimates vary greatly by class and race. Overall, black women fare worse than white women, but wealthy women like Dana fall the farthest economically, with one study citing a 55 percent decline in income for women in the top third of the income bracket, compared with a 23 percent drop for women in the bottom third. Nevertheless, a faction intent on turning back the clock on no-fault divorce across America remains. Between 1997 and 2001, 26 states considered covenant marriage laws\u2014an optional marriage contract with requirements for counseling and waiting periods, making it considerably more difficult to break. Covenant marriage, however, was adopted by only three states\u2014Louisiana, followed by Arizona and Arkansas\u2014and subsequently, few couples in those states have opted for it. A host of other bills to reinstate the fault requirement, require mutual consent in divorces involving children, and other restrictions, which appear largely in more conservative states, have all failed. Women, meanwhile, continue to suffer economically in divorce. For women who don&amp;#039;t remarry, the situation is quite bleak. They achieve almost no upward mobility within five years, though somewhat more within 10. For most women, however, the fin\u00ADancial crunch is temporary. Women who remarry typically exceed the financial status of their first marriage; 54 percent of first-time divorced women remarry in five years, and three-quarters do within 10 years, according to a 2002 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Clearly, Pappas and her crew are still carrying Weitzman&amp;#039;s mantle. (Pappas referenced her work twice in our conversation.) The NOW-NYS president is undeterred by the statistic that women initiate roughly two-thirds of divorces, though this certainly undermines the value of women maintaining the ability to block the very divorces they want. Both Pappas and her chair of domestic rela\u00ADtions law task force, Gloria Jacobs, are adamant that the current law does provide women with an economic advantage over no-fault law. Jacobs admits that their evidence is anecdotal. &amp;quot;There aren&amp;#039;t columns [from studies] that say, `Here&amp;#039;s what I get when I have fault&amp;#039; and `Here&amp;#039;s what I get under no-fault,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But if you take away the need to settle, I can&amp;#039;t see that that&amp;#039;s helping women.&amp;quot; Jacobs emphasizes that 95 percent of cases settle out of court, though her point is somewhat misleading, as many couples settle out of desperation, or because they can&amp;#039;t afford legal help. Those fighting for no-fault accuse NOW-NYS of ignoring the facts. &amp;quot;There is no evidence to support the claim that no-fault provides women with a significant bargaining advantage,&amp;quot; says Brooklyn Law School professor Marsha Garrison, who compared support awards in New York with those in other states and concluded that no-fault divorce didn&amp;#039;t cause a decline in awards. Moreover, as forum participant Judge Sondra Miller noted forcefully, &amp;quot;This [fight] isn&amp;#039;t only about money.&amp;quot; Women are more susceptible to becoming trapped in bad marriages. A man at last resort has the escape clause of moving to a neighboring no-fault state, whereas women most often caring for children don&amp;#039;t. On a more macro level, there&amp;#039;s even an argument to be made that no-fault divorce actually has benefited women in some fundamental ways. According to a 2006 University of Pennsylvania study, incidence of domestic violence against women eventually dropped by a third and female suicide rates declined 20 percent in states that adopted no-fault law\u2014Utah, South Dakota, and Ohio among the most recent to do so, in the late 1980s. The same economists also reported that less restrictive divorce laws improve a woman&amp;#039;s status inside the marriage. With the credible threat of leaving, she increases her bargaining power within the relationship, which can lead to better treatment, she asserts. Additionally, the rise of divorce through most of the twentieth century created a set of incentives that helped liberate women. As divorce became more commonplace\u2014it now hovers around 43 percent for first marriages\u2014women increasingly looked to maintain career options as insurance against it. A reinforcing loop began: The more self-sufficient women became, the more confident they were to leave unhappy marriages. Sheindlin puts it succinctly: &amp;quot;I think some vocal opponents have been bamboozled to believe that the women and children are going to starve. That&amp;#039;s ludicrous. That is not what is happening. There are women out there today earning more than their mates.&amp;quot; The NOW-led coalition appears to be employing the exact bargaining tactic in Albany that they advocate women use to extract more favorable financial settlements. Even Jacobs admits they&amp;#039;re holding no-fault divorce &amp;quot;hostage&amp;quot; to broader reform demands. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not afraid to use that word,&amp;quot; she tells me. With big-money attorneys and heavyweight bar associations committed to changing the law, NOW-NYS has an opportunity to trade lawyers&amp;#039; support for its demands. The group&amp;#039;s tactic irks an academic who participated in the no-fault forum: &amp;quot;I think there should be peace in the world. And I don&amp;#039;t think we should get out of Iraq until there is peace in the world. That&amp;#039;s what they are doing,&amp;quot; he quips. Many no-fault proponents are urging NOW to approach reform in stages\u2014get no-fault, and then go for more. In fall 2007, New York Assemblyman Adam Bradley introduced a bill that adds &amp;quot;irretrievable breakdown&amp;quot; to the list of acceptable divorce grounds, but the bill didn&amp;#039;t make it out of the judiciary committee in January, and as of April, it was still languishing there. The day after Dana was denied her divorce, she says Michael sent her a term sheet that proposed the same 50 percent custody arrangement he&amp;#039;d originally offered. She maintains he later claimed the settlement represented a 29 percent share of the assets, though there was no way for her to know for sure. (Michael characterizes it as &amp;quot;millions of dollars, as well as...child support that well exceeded the children&amp;#039;s actual expenses.&amp;quot;) With zero leverage and no energy to keep fighting, she signed his offer. Several weeks later, Dana says, he asked for his custody share to be reduced. &amp;quot;He just had to win,&amp;quot; she adds. Dana has moved on\u2014she married Jacques DuToit last summer and the two were expecting a baby boy this May. When we spoke last fall, she lit up when she described a recent living room wrestling match between her and Jacques and the three kids. There was a fire going in the fireplace, and everyone was rolling around on the rug and laughing. &amp;quot;This is what I always wanted for my kids. This feels like a family,&amp;quot; she says. As Michael&amp;#039;s hold on her continues to recede, she is able to be a little reflective. She offers up one of the ways in which she has changed forever: &amp;quot;Now when I meet someone who is divorced, I know they must have really wanted a divorce. Nobody breaks up their family or tears their life apart like this because they want to,&amp;quot; she says, and sighs. &amp;quot;It is a last resort.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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