part ii • legal cultures • kjell å modéer I have. It’s intrinsically interesting. It’s also a field of law that has undergone enormous social change. Enormous. This change reflects what is happening in society. I have written, for instance, about the history of divorce law.21 Suddenly in the late nineteenth century there was a rapid rise in the divorce rate, reflecting changes in society. We had the rise of so-called ‘companionate marriage’.22 In traditional marriage, the roles are very clear-cut: what the wife does, what the husband does. It was relatively easy to fill those roles. You knew what you were supposed to do. A woman’s friends were mostly other women; his social life was with other men. Then, for complex reasons, gender roles began to change. The spouse was supposed to be a partner. It became hard to fulfil the new roles. Marriage became more brittle. But it was hard for the law to adjust, for complex political reasons. Powerful forces refused to allow easy divorce. So what you developed was a dual system. Divorce did become easy to get, but you had to lie to get your divorce. The history of divorce law, and the law of marriage too: these are enormously interesting, from a social standpoint. Yes, it pioneered no-fault divorce. Now every state now has it. New Yorkwas the last to adopt it. California was the first but it spread all over the country. Not because of California, but because the same forces that were at work there were at work elsewhere as well. 20 Lawrence M. Friedman, Private Lives: Families, Individuals, and the Law(Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2005); Joanna Grossman & Lawrence M. Friedman, Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America (Princeton: PUP, 2011). 21 Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘Rights of Passage:Divorce Law in Historical Perspective’,Oregon Law Review63 (1984), 649 ff. 22 Rebecca L Davis, ‘“Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry”: The Companionate Marriage Controversy’, Journal of American History 94/4 (2008), 1137–63 118 You have also been increasingly interested in problems related to family law. You have written a couple of books on the subject.20 And especially California law has been very liberal. Let me put it this way. You have always underscored the importance of legal contexts, combining comparative law with legal history and law and society. And you are also a great storyteller; you have always produced good narra-
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