Tini Owens—refused her divorce by the Court of Appeal—could have been rescued from the misery of her marriage had the judges considered Parliament’s intent and applied a “deductive” approach, a prominent family lawyer has argued.
Practitioners renewed calls for Parliament to introduce “no-fault divorce” last week, following the judgment in Owens v Owens [2017] EWCA Civ 182. Sir James Munby held that, although the marriage had broken down, the wife had failed to prove, within the meaning of s 1(2)(b) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, that her husband “has behaved in such a way that [she] cannot reasonably be expected to live with [him]”.
Writing in NLJ this week, however, family law solicitor-advocate David Burrows says: “The Court of Appeal judges do not seem to have turned the question round and asked, deductively: if we find a marriage to be dead, does that not prove that at some level someone—B—must have behaved in a way that A ‘cannot reasonably be expected to live with’. When this law was passed, can it have been Parliament’s intention that a dead marriage should be preserved? I doubt it.”
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