LONDON - In her 30-odd years as a divorce lawyer, Vanessa Lloyd Platt has heard it all. The woman who sued for divorce because her husband insisted she dress and speak in the language of a Klingon character from "Star Trek." The man who declared that his wife had maliciously and repeatedly served him his least favorite dish, tuna casserole.

"It's insane," Ms. Lloyd Platt said. "These things should not have any part in the procedure."

But they come up all the time in Britain, which does not have a no-fault divorce law. In one recent case in London's Court of Appeal, the judge criticized English divorce law for letting such picayune matters become an issue.

If the government had enacted past proposals to allow no-fault divorce, the judge, Justice Matthew Thorpe, told the court, "there would have been no need for these painful investigations, which seem to represent the social values of a bygone age."

Under current British law, divorces are granted only under one of five categories, including adultery and abandonment. About half of the cases fall under the heading of a category called unreasonable behavior, in which one party has to accuse the other of acting so that living together has become intolerable.

Many divorce lawyers and judges have long chafed at the requirement, and some like Ms. Lloyd Platt are campaigning to change the law to allow no-fault divorce.

Inspired by Justice Thorpe's remarks, Ms. Lloyd Platt compiled a list in The Times of London of some of the odder accusations of fault she and other lawyers have come across in divorce petitions.

In addition to the Klingon case, there was the man whose wife "would without justification flirt with any builder or tradesman, inappropriately touching them and declaring that she could not stop herself." There were complaints about husbands with atrocious body odor and others who changed the channels too fast. One petition read: "The respondent insisted that his pet tarantula, Timmy, slept in a glass case next to the matrimonial bed."

In Britain, few divorce cases go to trial, so parties have to work out - either amicably or unamicably - who is at fault and why.

"People have had to start playing games with this, with the complicity of the court," said Patrick Chamberlayne, a divorce lawyer in London. "They put their heads together and say, 'Surely we can come up with something that the court will agree on.'"

In some cases, though, the divorce petition is used as an "instrument of punishment," Mr. Chamberlayne said.

"The more angry the person, the more they dislike the other person, the more likely you will find extreme examples of behavior," he said. "Sexual impropriety, extreme sexual behavior, every vice you can imagine, drugs, prostitution, homosexuality - the more wounded you are, the more this stuff pours out."

People going through a divorce say the unreasonable behavior element just creates more trauma.

"It was a legal nicety which stuck the knife into the person who was suffering the most" - namely, he himself, said a 51-year-old writer in London whose now ex-wife filed for divorce about five years ago.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice said the government had no plans to reform the law.

Sometimes, Ms. Lloyd Platt said, it is hard to keep a straight face, as in the case of the petition claiming "the respondent is unreasonably demanding sex every night from the petitioner, which is causing friction between the parties."

The New York Times

(China Daily 04/15/2012 page9)