California removed blame from divorce law

Under fault-based divorce law, the only lawful way to end a marriage in most US states was to prove one spouse guilty of a specific offense — adultery, cruelty, desertion — in open court, with the other spouse required to be legally innocent for the divorce to be granted at all. Couples who simply wanted to separate amicably had no lawful path to do so; the system forced them to fabricate grounds, commit perjury, or stage evidence of misconduct that often hadn't occurred, since a mutual, blameless breakup wasn't a category the law recognized.

Rather than try to make fault-finding fairer or faster, a state study commission and the California legislature concluded the fault requirement itself was the problem — it wasn't protecting marriages or establishing truth, it was manufacturing false testimony as the price of admission to divorce court. Governor Reagan, whose own 1948 divorce from Jane Wyman had been finalized only after she accused him in court of 'mental cruelty,' signed the Family Law Act in 1969, eliminating the fault requirement entirely.

Let couples divorce by citing irreconcilable differences, removing the need to prove fault and collapsing the adversarial trial into an administrative filing.

Removing fault eliminated the need to fabricate grounds, so couples no longer had to lie to get divorced.

Without a fault trial, the adversarial process collapsed into an administrative filing, reducing conflict.

The fix targeted the root cause (incentive to lie) rather than trying to detect lies better, so it worked without changing people's behavior.

When a process requires proving blame before it can proceed, check if that step produces truth or just incentives to lie; if the outcome doesn't depend on fault, remove it.

California became the first US state with no-fault divorce in 1970; every state adopted some form within two decades. No-fault divorce became the national and eventually near-universal Western standard for ending a marriage, credited with sharply reducing perjury and adversarial courtroom conflict in divorce proceedings, though it remains politically contested by critics who argue it made divorce too easy to obtain.