Making Divorce Easier : The Role of No-Fault and Unilateral Revisited

The Anglo-Saxon literature regarding the positive relation between 'making divorce easier' and divorce rates has mainly focused on the introduction of no-fault and unilateral divorce grounds. This approach was mimicked to analyse the impact of more lenient divorce legislation in Europe. Using the case study of Belgium we demonstrate that both no-fault and unilateral might not be the ideal proxies for 'making divorce easier' and propose an alternative approach which does manage to capture the time-varying legislative environment