Courts: Slowdown for Quickie Divorces

When Mrs. Martin Wolf went to court in New Jersey to force her estranged husband to support her, she got a shock. Architect Wolf, she discovered, had already divorced her more than a year earlier in Alabama. Moreover, she had “agreed” to the action. Her signature was on the papers.

Mrs. Wolf was one more victim of Alabama’s “quickie” divorce racket, which the state legislature itself created in 1945. Until then, Alabama required one year’s residence for plaintiffs seeking divorce from outside-the-state spouses. But under a brief amendment, the residence requirement was waived if “the court has jurisdiction of both parties.” As Alabama lawyers saw it, this allowed even a single day’s residence to serve for purposes of divorce so long as the plaintiff claimed “intent” to live in Alabama. All a lawyer needed in addition was the defendant’s signed agreement that the case be tried in Alabama. Mrs. Wolf says that her husband’s divorce was even easier: some one forged her agreement.

Hidden Records. In the quickie heyday, thousands of outsiders flocked to Alabama to get divorced between lunch and cocktails. Alabama acquired—for at least an hour—such famous citizens as baseball’s Hank Greenberg, Mrs. Aristotle (“Tina”) Onassis and TV’s John Daly (so he could marry the daughter of Chief Justice Earl Warren). Some quickie lawyers raked in as much as $200,000 a year. In 1961 the Alabama Bar Association threatened to disbar lawyers knowingly involved in phony quickies. That cut the Alabama divorce rate by almost one-third, but quickie business persisted, notably in the town of Geneva (pop. 3,840), seat of a Florida-border county that in 1962-63 granted more than 2,500 divorces, including Mrs. Wolfs.

With Mrs. Wolf as a star witness, the bar association has just held stern hearings in Geneva. Local Lawyers Edward C. Boswell and Jack Smith have been indefinitely suspended from practice. Suspended for two years: State Senator Neil Metcalf, charged with falking the residence of a New Jersey woman who got home just in time to present her husband with a divorce on Father’s Day. Similarly suspended was Judge George Black of Geneva County Inferior Court, where investigators found a locked room containing hidden quickie records. Architect Wolf’s own lawyer, Ned Moore, faces a further hearing in nearby Andalusia.

Foreign Courts. All this may slow down Alabama quickies, although the state legislature has yet to reform the law. But outsiders already divorced in Alabama may be in for trouble. The U.S. Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause (Article IV, Section 1) requires all states to honor the court decisions of other states unless the “foreign” courts are shown to lack jurisdiction. In legalese, an Alabama quickie is open to attack if the plaintiff was not a bona fide resident, or if the defendant’s signature was obtained by threat or forgery. In one recent New York case, a wife sued her second husband for separation. He counter-claimed for annulment, saying that she had married him on the strength of a shaky Alabama quickie. He won, leaving her without support, let alone alimony. For years to come, such Alabama reverberations are likely to spread across the country.