Disillusioned Law Professor Enlightens Us All - Part I

This extended commentary on the misandrist nature of Anglo-American Common Law makes fascinating reading. I have been trying to integrate this revolutionary material into my new book 'Foreign Shores' but really lack the legal knowledge or expertise - besides, it deserves a book in its own right. The professor's brilliant comments form an extensive - indeed, definitive - essay on these issues, which I will post in three parts:

Thank you, Mr. Kshatriya, in your Blog posts last month for a quality discussion of the real world distinctions between the common law of the Anglo-Saxon world and the civil law of mainland Europe, Latin America and Asia. As a law professor and father of a divorcee, and teacher of dozens of lawyers who have gone on to wear the judge’s robe, I can speak to the topic of the Anglo common-law perversions of family law and the consequent need to expatriate, from professional and personal experience, Several of my own students, current and modern directed me to the discussion of this topic on your Blog, and I have read with quite some interest how it has developed. From one of my student’s remarks on recent Blog entries here, it appears you are writing a more detail-rich book on this highly relevant topic, and I thus seek to provide more rigorous information that corroborates and expands upon what you and your bloggers, apparently many attorneys themselves, have expressed.

To give a summary up-front what I will elaborate below, you are correct in that the divorce law and general family law picture in the US and Anglo world more broadly has become perilously distorted and corrupted by extreme ideology, to the point that marriage and family formation in the Anglo world in general, and America in particular, entail horrific financial and social risks that make them unviable options for any spouse with a good career, assets, children or indeed anything to lose. Family courts now are indeed quite “misandrist” and deleterious to men, and in particular to white (Caucasian) and Asian men as your Bloggers have noticed, due to something called “conflict theory” which I will explain below. But they are also quite harmful to family-oriented and professional women, and families above all, as I will also address.

I will detail why this is below, but to express it in outline form, it results from a dreadful combination of five factors which you have variously covered in previous Blog posts and comments, and which I will lay out rigorously here:

1: Anglo-Saxon (Anglo-Norman) common law and specifically, the fundamentally altered form of common law that has become dominant since the start of the 20th century due to critical philosophic and theoretic changes to its central elements, from prominent mostly American jurists in the century.
2: Conflict theory, the theoretic foundation of what you all generally recognize as political correctness, cultural marxism, critical theory and other modern sociologic thought systems that base themselves in an ideology hostile to the West and its traditionally dominant cultural and ethnic groups.
3: Shameless predatory profiteering and rent seeker behavior grossly corrupting the US/Anglo divorce and family courts, a manner of crony capitalistic perversion that has also become perversely wedded to the cultural marxist side of things and drives many of its distorting extremes.
4: Absolute failure of the legal education system, particularly for future judges, to convey the realities of income instability and “breadwinning” in the modern economy compared to the 1970’s, a criticism that many of us in law school faculties have launched to reform curricula, to no avail.
5: The broader unique cultural milieu of the Anglo world which leaves it vulnerable to strange puritanic excesses and public shaming tendencies, thus “metoo” in its extreme forms. This appears to be a topic you have already covered in more detail.

Expatriation out of the Anglo world, as you have said, genuinely is the only remaining option for marriage and family, because as I will explain below, the perversion of the common law at its heart CANNOT be reformed in the short or long term given predominating orthodoxies in legal thinking and training—the common law cannot be “reformed” by legislative statute or even Constitutional amendment, is effectively unchecked by popular will or democratic constraints and in many ways transcends the Constitution itself. You most leave and go abroad, and in my career working in global corporate law before becoming a professor, I’ve come to know the legal and social circumstances across many continents. Job opportunities and some cultural similarity are of course major considerations for expatriation, and here is the one bit of good news: expatriation for family formation will work almost anywhere if you move to a functioning society with a civil law system. Thus dozens of quality, advanced countries, mostly Western or South American, also in East, S.E. and parts of South Asia if you have Asian ancestry, in essence anywhere colored blue or purple (or up to a point yellow, as I’ll explain) on this often cited map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Map_of_the_Legal_systems_of_the_world_%28en%29.png/300px-Map_of_the_Legal_systems_of_the_world_%28en%29.png

The more intelligent, forward-thinking civil law-based family law systems are available throughout the world, and most are first-world, or very advanced yet inexpensive second world nations: continental, central and eastern Europe, that is both western Europe—ex. France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain and Italy—and central or eastern European ex. Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Greece and Slovakia, advanced Central and South American countries and not only Chile, Uruguay and Argentina but also large portions of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica and even Nicaragua, as well as much of eastern Asia that is Japan, Taiwan, Korea, ironically Hong Kong and Singapore despite their British history, China—which is now quite first-world yet inexpensive in its major population centers—and even much of southeast Asia, and surprisingly, parts of India and the Subcontinent where the traditional or statutory law trumps the British-imposed common law, with options depending on your industry and language ability. (I don’t know about Israel specifically but if, as your Bloggers say, it has adopted the Anglo common law standard de facto, that is a tragedy and not a place a family oriented person should move to.)

Before getting into more specifics of what I mean by the “new common law” from the 20th century, which is the source of so much of the distortion and corruption that dominates US/Anglo family courts, I wanted to burst one common delusion that many young American and Canadian men have, and men in Anglo countries as a whole, as well as some successful professional and/or just family-oriented young women also in the US and Anglo world more generally, who aspire to families. It is about why you absolutely must not even contemplate marriage or family formation in the Anglo world anymore, for your own sake and even more for that of your future family. Having been reared in a rural and traditionally religious part of the United States where people married early, along with mentoring many hot shot young attorneys raking in big bucks and seeing themselves atop the world, I have encountered a great number of young men in particular who disregard our advice on the necessity of expatriation from the US and the Anglo realm generally speaking, to marry and start their families. The response I hear all the time: they claim that they and their relationships are special, they’ll buck the trend of high US divorce and broken families. If you’re thinking of doing this, DON’T.

What you may not understand especially if young, and which it took even seasoned and successful law profs like myself and fellow faculty decades to appreciate, is that the family law system throughout the Anglo world is thoroughly stacked against you: it is DESIGNED to ruin you and extract every last penny from you financially, and reduce you emotionally. This is a feature, as my computer-oriented colleagues at the uni would say, not a bug. Remember, even if you have the proverbial perfect marriage, perfect friendship and perfect spouse on the day of your wedding, your relationship 10 let alone 20 years later will be with a person quite a ways different from the one you walk down the aisle with. Hopefully the two of you will still love, respect and want to be with each other, but in the event that this future unknown doesn’t work out for you—and statistically, in light of Anglo divorce rates, it likely won’t if we’re being honest—you don’t want to face ruin and the horrors of poverty and de facto slavery in an Anglo country which increasingly is the norm for a bread-winning spouse after divorce. Remember, a spouse and especially a wife in the Anglo world can file for divorce for even trivial reasons, and then make enormous claims on your finances and estate while seizing your children.

So yes, you may “buck the trend” and have a happy marriage and family in the US or another Anglo country. For a while. But every single future day of your marriage, the built-in corruption of the Anglo common law-based divorce court system will bring you closer and closer to failure, and if you have assets and earning potential both present and future to take, they will likely be taken from you. I do not exaggerate one slight bit when I say that a major proportion of the US GDP is from the booming “business” of divorce and all the assets that are seized and change hands, with wealth extracted from true earners and producers (usually husbands, in business or professional fields) and handed to profligate ex-spouses, the courts, municipalities and state funds themselves. A number of my ex-students have become divorce court judges, many others divorce attorneys, and they’re among the most highly paid of the US legal profession—a Faustian bargain, as I’ve seen how they’re corrupted by their “trade” and the damage to society it causes.

You must understand that no matter how happy and stable your marriage in any part of the Anglo world may at first appear, the often subtle cultural imperatives to divorce will ring louder in your spouse’s ears, the gossip will grow louder, the vulture-like circling of divorce attorney profiteers will reach your spouse, and eventually the prospect of windfalls from the process will bring your marriage, and disaster for you, closer and closer to the brink. You may be a very special man, and your relationship may be something very extraordinary. But what too many young men in America and the Anglo world don’t appreciate, is that they are up against a system designed for their marriage to fail, and to profiteer at their expense. Precise divorce stats are debated since the prospective and retrospective studies usually cut-off at 20 to 30 years, but some of the worst divorces happen after that, and some research in the legal literature suggests it may reach somewhere in range of 55-65%, with alimony costs often crushing for that long a marriage, and child support devastating for shorter ones. The statistics are even grimmer because remember, a growing proportion of Americans, Canadians and other Anglo country citizens elect not to marry anymore, the ones who do are a self-selected sub-set who are considered “marriageable”, more affluent and still believe in the institution of marriage. Yet even among that more “pro-marriage” and “selected for success” sub-set, divorce rates in Anglo countries are horrifyingly high!

The shockingly high divorce rate in the Anglo world, even in light of the significant pre-selection and self-selection of couples marrying when they, supposedly, have a higher rate of success and believe in the institution, should alarm you all the more when you think about why this is. It is a dreadful reminder, as I said before, that the Anglo common law-based family law system is DESIGNED to break your marriage and bring you to ruin, to satisfy the ideological PC extremes to which the legal profession and judges (who make the common law) are more-and-more being steered, and the lusting for profits of the divorce courts and attorneys. Out of YOUR pocket, no less. In fact, the more responsible and upstanding a citizen you are, and the more skilled, and the more you earn and save, then the better a target you’ll be for the voraciously predatory nature of the US family courts, to the point you’ll even face prison time if your financial fortunes change and child and/or spousal support payments become excessive. In theory divorce court judges are supposed to reduce your support burdens—in practice, more-and-more they don’t, and it is true, once high-earning professionals can and are sent to American prisons after a divorce when their finances suffer an unexpected hit.

All incentives of Anglo family law and the associated Anglo culture now point in the direction of encouraging broken families, there’s simply too much money to be made from divorce to discourage it, and too many ideological scores to be satisfied with it. Already we can see a polar opposite in comparison to the globe outside the Anglo world, where societies have intelligently walled off divorce as a profit-making center, removed incentives for it and—through culture, civil law and other factors—removed the ideological as well as the financial drive to promote divorce and the financial ruination that accompanies it in the Anglo world. In short you can be the perfect husband (or wife, in some cases): a high earner, good parent, helping around the house, and the chances are, it’s still going to fall apart for you. Because that is what the American family law system is now designed to do to you and your family: to make it fall apart, for both ideologic and profit-driven reasons.

Such was the case with my son and his marriage. He was the proverbial “perfect husband” according to PC/NYT ”new man” standards. He worked very hard on the job, earning excellent money that kept his wife and kids in comfort and even luxury. Yet he truly loved them, took good care of his family, went out to parks and restaurants, and cleaned up and did chores at home even though he was exhausted from work. His wife didn’t have to work but he didn’t prohibit her, encouraging her to pursue fun side jobs that she did well. His wife even feted him in “no better hubby” posts on Facebook and with her friends. Until, as many wives do, she simply got bored. He was “too good”. Again, as many women do, she wanted some danger and action, and while my husband even adapted somewhat to get involved in interesting activities, there was only so much he could do with his working schedule.

Now here, again, is where the corruption and perversion of the Anglo family law system come into sharp contrast with the calmer, saner policies in the rest of the world. What happened to my son’s wife isn’t pleasant to talk about, but it’s also very common. Just the nature of the human beast, especially married women—as even my own long-married wife will admit (I’m one of the very few lucky ones to never face separation or divorce)--to crave the new, unknown and excited. And so she began having clandestine relations with other men. When I found out, I was upset, but not angry with my daughter-in-law, as I said I’ve seen enough across the world to know this is simply human beings being human beings.

But outside the Anglo world, the urges would be quenched more sensibly and discreetly. Since a wife. or a husband, has no prospect of profiting from divorce, and since there is no ideology or legal structure, that is no Anglo common law, to promote and institutionalize divorce, a woman has nothing to gain from breaking up the marriage whenever she wants to “try something new”.

A straying or dissatisfied wife outside the Anglo world will possibly sleep with the muscleman washing her car at times, take on a secret identity or even try an open relationship or swinging. (This is reasonably common in Europe and some portions of South America to ease relationship tension, as they are less puritanic in culture and seem able to grasp and hold to a bigger picture.) But the part that matters, is that the marriage will stay intact despite the straying, because the woman, the lawyers and the courts have no profit incentive to encourage it. And if it does happen, she will still need to take responsibility and become an earner, which fortunately, those societies also provide an assist for, in the interest of making sure everyone comes out OK. Custody, for the most part, stays a shared proposition. So whether the husband is “too perfect” (as my son supposedly was) or “far too imperfect” (which men in particular are stigmatized as in Anglo societies), divorce outside of the Anglo world happens less often and is much more humane and restrained. Particularly so in Europe (excluding Britain) and Central and South American countries that have largely been shaped by French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian civil law customs and culture.

Sadly, this was not the case for my son in the United States of America, and the perversions of Anglo common law make it easy to guess what happened next. His wife did file for divorce, took more than a decade of assets he’d carefully saved, pillaged the kids’ college fund, took the house, took the kids, the family van and then, despite the year to year variation in my son’s earning power, reached a judgment to demand exorbitant child support—more for her than the kids—and then alimony support on top, essentially permanent. My son was, of course, devastated. And in many lean years, his mother and I had to lend him money to keep him from facing possible prison time for contempt. He was able to eventually arrange a different settlement for a lump-sum payment. After which he expatriated, first to Chile, a great country to set up in, and subsequently part of the year in Germany with his new German-Chilean wife and child.

But the lesson here is how horribly corrupted and perverted the Anglo divorce law structure has become. Despite the terrible ways my daughter-in-law hurt my son, she was never evil or malicious. She was simply weak emotionally, as unfortunately, far too many pampered wives are or become. And outside the Anglo world, she would have sowed her wild oats but stayed in the marriage. But in the Anglo world, she brought ruin to my son and her family. Above all, just because she could, and because that’s what the corrupted common law-based Anglo family law system is designed to do, with profiteers in the system encouraging her every step of the way. Beyond the important cultural factors on the side, civil law countries don’t have these horrible perversions of family law because the civil law makes them impossible. (For a sense of the emotional toll of Anglo divorce, here are a dozen men echoing many of the things my son said, particularly #5: “I was a resource, not a person”. www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/16/divorce-confessions_n_5999050.html Such is it for divorcees in the Anglo world, particularly white and Asian men with assets and a work ethic.)

Here is a metaphor, one my more mechanic-oriented other son related to me. If you get married in an Anglo country, you are metaphorically walking home every day to a home that has a loaded gun behind the front door with a trigger slightly pulled by a rubber band under gentle tension, and that would go off with accumulated pulls or a major vibration. On any given day, the chances of that gun going off and striking you are very small. But add up all the days together, and the risk becomes horrifically high that the gun will go off and you will be shot opening the door. Common sense would tell you, the solution is not to keep the loaded gun at your door, happily sighing in relief that it hasn’t gone off yet or tuning out the real danger because it’s small on any given day. This is a solid metaphor for the risk from marriage and family formation in the common-law US and Anglo world, small on any given day, but enormous when considered over years, and horribly devastating and bankrupting to you when it does happen. Instead, common sense says the solution would be to remove the loaded gun entirely from your front door. That is what expatriating to a civil law country, outside the Anglo world provides you. It removes the loaded gun as a threat, as I well detail below.

The Professor's brilliant and incisive analysis will continue in subsequent posts. It is no surprise that bright, aspirational young law students are reading this blog, however - aspirational, smart young men are clearly the males most at risk from misandrist divorce settlements in the Anglosphere.