Legal Minds at Work

For 14 years sobersided U.S. judges have muttered about the legality of Nevada's easy divorces. But armies of U.S. citizens went to Reno anyhow. Eventually, like the bull market of the fabulous '20s, Nevada divorce was accepted as a sound and logical American institution. Last week the crash came. The U.S. Supreme Court gave other states the right to deny Nevada's most cherished legal doctrine: that anyone spending six weeks within its borders has established a legal domicile, is thus entitled to a quick-won divorce.

The earthquake which opened this spectacular fissure under Nevada's gaudy divorce mills had its beginning in a frame store at Granite Falls, N.C. (pop. 1,873). The storekeeper, one Otis Baxter Williams, a greying, middle-aged father of four, fell in love with Mrs. Lillie Hendrix, the plump, bespectacled wife of the store's handy man. In 1940, stirred by their autumnal romance, they stole out of Granite Falls, drove west to a Las Vegas auto court, won Nevada divorces. They married and headed for home, expecting nothing but happy days.

Hell Hath No Fury. But the storekeeper's aging first wife was waiting. She also knew her North Carolina law. Shortly after they entered the state she had them arrested. A jury found them guilty of bigamous cohabitation. Reviewing the case in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the North Carolina courts. In doing so it ruled that citizens of one state may establish a legal domicile in another state for no other reason than getting a divorce.

U.S. lawyers and newspapers hailed the ruling as proof that Nevada and Florida divorces had achieved final, legal respectability. Nevada's toiling judges, their position secured, ground out divorces for Doris Duke, Gypsy Rose Lee, Gloria Vanderbilt and thousands of other U.S. women of all stations. But the Supreme Court had left one loophole--it had not defined the term "legal domicile." A hawk-eyed North Carolina attorney general spotted it.

Jealous of his state's strait-laced divorce law, he charged that Otis Williams & wife were still living in sin. Once again they were arrested, tried, found guilty. Once more they took refuge in appeal. But last week the Supreme Court ruled against them. Said Justice Felix Frankfurter for the 6-to-3 majority: each state can determine for itself whether it will accept the divorce procedures of another, or reject them.

Muscular Prose. Dissenting justices stated their objections in muscular prose. Said Hugo La Fayette Black: "The Williamses have been convicted under a statute so uncertain in its application that not even the most learned member of the bar could have advised them in advance as to whether their conduct would violate the law. . . . [This] will cast a cloud over the lives of countless . . . divorced persons in the U.S."

All over the U.S., battalions of Nevada divorcees asked: "How will this affect me?" The minority whose divorce suits had been contested had nothing to worry about. Neither did those who had won uncontested divorce suits at which their defendant husbands or wives had been legally represented. But holders of default decrees (i.e., those whose mates had not been served with divorce papers in Nevada, or had not been legally represented at the trial) faced potential difficulties. If their former mates sued them, if their home states refused to honor Nevada's perfunctory theory of legal domicile, they might become involved in endless tangles (property settlements, wills, etc.). If they remarried, they might face bigamy charges, or find the children of their second marriages adjudged bastards. The effects of the decision might make themselves felt for years.

But other people's potential troubles were academic to hapless Otis Williams and Lillie Hendrix. Despite the fact that Williams' first wife had died, that Lillie's former husband had remarried twice, both faced penitentiary sentences.

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