The Legal Issues 161
Divorce is one occasion where a woman can, for free, take back
her maiden name. Ordinarily, if you want to get your name
changed you must file a special petition through the appropri-
ate governmental agency and pay a few hundred dollars in legal
and filing fees.
However, the inclusion in a divorce decree of a provision
returning the wife to her maiden (or former married) name has
the legal (and free) effect of a name change.
Premarital Agreements
Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
—Benjamin Franklin
Premarital agreements (also known as prenuptial or antenup-
tial agreements) are contracts entered into prospectively by two
spouses before they get married, which essentially dictate, in
advance, what the terms of the property settlement will be in the
event of a divorce. In the old days, these documents were often
viewed as not even being enforceable. In fact, there was a serious
concern, from a public policy standpoint, that premarital agree-
ments might tend to encourage people to divorce.
Prenuptials: are they morally and socially acceptable? For many
years, even suggesting a prenuptial agreement was considered
the ultimate in gauche premarital bad taste—not to mention the
tacky public relations problem it posed for the wealthier spouse
who wanted such an agreement to try and impose it on their
poor, disadvantaged spouse. Furthermore, from a legal enforce-
ability standpoint, these agreements were often viewed as not
being worth the paper they were written on. All that has now
changed.
Hawai‘i, California, and many other progressive states (in fact,
at last count, more than one-half of all states) have now passed
statutes such as the Uniform Premarital Agreement Act, which
essentially represent a total about-face on this issue. The statutes
in these states now clearly mandate that properly handled pre-
marital agreements will indeed be binding documents. It appears
that the public policy concerns about inadvertently encouraging