Cincinnati Law Review
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI LAW REVIEW PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE BOARD OF EDITORS VOLUME 56 1987 No. I EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE: A PERSPECTIVE ON NO-FAULT DIVORCE AND ITS AFTERMATH* Herma Hill Kay** INTRODUCTION Nearly twenty years ago, in 1969, California adopted the first no- fault divorce law in the United States.' In the briefer span of ten years within that period, beginning in 1972, the nation participated in an intense debate over the proper roles of women and men as Congress proposed and the state legislatures debated whether to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Con- * A shorter version of this paper was delivered on April 3 and 4, 1986, as the Robert S. Marx Lectures at the College of Law, University of Cincinnati. ** Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley. B.A. 1956, Southern Methodist University;J.D. 1959, University of Chicago. The author was a member of the California Governor's Commission on the Family; Co-Reporter of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act; and a Co-Investigator on the California Divorce Law Research Project (Dr. Lenore Weitzman, Principal Investigator). I am grateful to my research assistant, Barbara Flagg, for her help. Editor's Note: In Ohio, the syllabus of an opinion of the Ohio Supreme Court states the controlling points of law. See Rule I(B) of the Ohio Supreme Court Rules for the Reporting of Decisions. Because the text of opinions merely discusses these controlling points of law, the University of Cincinnati Law Review cites to the syllabi wherever possible. 1.
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