Letty and Choice of Law

Before there were Delaware corporations and Cayman Islands hedge funds and Cook Islands asset protection trusts, there were Nevada divorces. The characters in Letty Fox: Her Luck by Christina Stead, understand this: they know that the task of a young woman in the 3os is to get married, and collect alimony. Well, yes, there is the matter of a divorce but this is a transitory instrument: a train trip to Reno, a bit of lipstick on the pig of the local residency requirements. and then home with a (sometimes fragile) triumph on a piece if paper. But Grandmother Morgan knows that you can't push it too far:

Now, if we start plundering the men, if we burden the trade with more than it can bear, it stands to reason that Congress of the Supreme Court or whoever does these things, don't you see, will start to go over the situation and we will get either no alimony at all, or else no divorce (which would be awful, girls, after all), or else a uniform law; and there are no pickings when there is a uniform law. You see what we women have now, in the U.S.A., is an arbitrage business ; we make pickings, even a fat living out of the differences between state laws, an excellent business, considering there are forty-eight states and not only a difference in the laws, but a confusion in the minds of judges, lawyers and divorcees.

--Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck (NYRB Paperback ed. )

Wiki has a splendid article about the culture of divorce at the old Riverside Hotel.