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28 J. Am. Acad. Matrimonial Law. 309 (2015-2016)
Reality and the Family Courts: Book Review: Jane Murphy and Jana Singer, Divorced from Reality: Rethinking Family Dispute Resolution

handle is hein.journals/jaaml28 and id is 323 raw text is: Vol. 28, 2015 Book Review, Jane Murphy and Jana Singer, Divorced from Reality: Rethinking Family Dispute Resolution New York: NYU Press, 2015. Pp. 240. Reality and the Family Courts by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone* Family law substance and procedure are intricately inter- twined; substantive family law reforms almost inevitably lead to procedural changes and, indeed, to changes in the role of the courts, lawyers, and often the law itself. Thus, in the era in which fault-based principles carved out limited exceptions to the princi- ple of life-long marriage, divorce procedures were formal, adver- sarial, and designed to produce moral (as well as legal) judgments. The original California no-fault divorce plan recog- nized that abolishing fault entirely from divorce would require new procedures to manage family dissolution, and it included a plan for a unified family court that would provide divorce coun- seling in lieu of declaring one (and only one) party at fault and establish a new, less acrimonious basis for reconstituting fami- lies.1 The plan combined both substantive legal reform and pro- cedural court reform; just as the substantive law was designed to minimize artifice and conflict, so too were the accompanying new procedures. The California legislature, willing to adopt no-fault reforms, but unwilling to pay for them, adopted the substantive changes without equipping the courts with the ability to deal with * Naomi Cahn is the Harold H. Greene Chair, George Washington Uni- versity Law School, and June Carbone is the Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology, University of Minnesota Law School. We thank Mary Kay Kis- thardt for her support of this review, and Nancy Levit for her edits. 1 See Herma Hill Kay, A Family Court: The California Proposal, 56 CA- LIF. L. REV. 1205, 1225 (1968); Richard C. Dinkelspiel & Aidan Gough, The Case for a Family Court-a Summary of the Report of the California Governor's Commission on the Family, 1 FAM. L.Q., Sept. 1967, at 70, 80. Book Review

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