Do We Believe in No-Fault Divorce?

The Style section of the Sunday New York Times usually has two pages of thumbnail wedding announcements (complete with tiny, charming photos), and one larger box entitled “Vows,” in which one lucky couple’s union is featured.  This past Sunday, the Vows column created a firestorm.   The featured couple – Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla – proudly described how their romance began when they were both married to other people, and how they met in a pre-kindergarten classroom at the school attended by their children (each has two children from a first marriage).  Although they assert that they kept it platonic for a long while, they eventually declared their love for each other, divorced their first spouses, and celebrated their marriage in the recent ceremony featured in the Times.  They described their life together as full of love, although they concede that they have hurt their former spouses and children, and they profess regret for having done so.

Certainly Riddell and Partilla aren’t the first unfaithful spouses to end up together, and they won’t be the last.  What is surprising is the frenzy of overwhelmingly negative reader comments to the Times.  “Why does the Times glorify home-wrecking?” queried David from NY.  A commenter identifying himself as Dr. Dubs from NYC was outraged: “So you’re telling me, as long as I’m happy, who cares what happens to my legally wedded spouse and kids?” he stormed.  “This story reeks of selfishness.”  Funny valentine from New Jersey commented that the Vows column “was absolutely the saddest story in the NYT, save the obits.”

Why the uproar in this era of no-fault divorce, not to mention in a society with a divorce rate of around 50 percent?

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Best of the Blogs: The Ernst & Young Case

It’s not really my area, but I’ve been especially interested this week in reading about the new civil fraud case brought by the State of New York against Ernst & Young.  The case arises from E&Y’s auditing work for Lehman Brothers, an early and important casualty of the financial crisis.  In this post, Matt Taibbi explains the basics of the Repo 105 transactions that Lehman used to hide its precarious financial position.  E&Y is now in trouble for signing off on Lehman’s questionable accounting statements.

For some helpful commentary on E&Y’s expected defense, see this post by Caleb Newquist at Going Concern.  In essence, E&Y’s position seems to be that it cannot be held liable under the New York law because it was Lehman, not E&Y, that produced the misleading financial statements and that used the statements to sell billions of dollars of securities before the collapse.  Apparently, there is no precedent under the state law for the prosecution of an accounting firm based on its role as an auditor, so the courts may have to wrestle with some difficult questions in the case.

What particularly interests me about the case is the way it echoes the prosecution of Arthur Anderson, which destroyed the venerable accounting firm as a result of its role in the Enron collapse.  

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Neighborhood Councils as Antidote to Minority Political Marginalization?

In many of America’s major cities, a sense of hopelessness and cynicism discourages political participation, especially by members of minority groups.  Disengagement, in turn, undermines accountability and facilitates corruption, which exacerbates public cynicism. 

How can the vicious circle be broken?  In a new paper on SSRN, Matt Parlow argues that neighborhood councils — “new substructures of local government that aim to involve citizens in the decision- and policy-making processes” — have the potential to raise the engagement level of minority citizens with local government.  He uses Detroit to illustate the problems of local government corruption and minority political marginalization in American cities, while pointing to Los Angeles as an example of a city that has had some recent success with neighborhood councils. 

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