UNDERSTANDING MODERN DIVORCE CLIENTS

"But I just don't understand why I can't have exactly what I want!" Ah yes, well, life is so unfair. "But you must not understand me. I must not be communicating. I'm hearing that you are not understanding. It's so simple. They just don't get it. All I want is to have complete control over everything concerning my child. Why can't they understand that? Don't you understand that?"

How often one hears this sort of talk these days. How impossible it often is to communicate that complete control is not so modest a goal, that in fact such completeness of control is impossible when, unfortunately, the child has, on this same earth, another living parent. If you say that, the client may contritely nod and acknowledge your wisdom, but actually the client neither agrees nor understands. It seems impossible for the client to understand. There is some kind of gap here.

Sometimes your jaw kind of drops when you hear this stuff. Your subtle body language betrays you are appalled. This is ungood. We are not empathizing here.

ONLY 100%

With the desire for 100% control, as with other client desires, the attorney must make some effort to understand the psychology of the yuppie client. You have to try to comprehend where these creatures are coming from, so to speak. You must even try to appreciate the child-raising philosophy that produced these strange-talking beings that are now maturing, coupling, reproducing and having their own divorce and custody problems. The better one understands the client -- or potential client -- the better the lawyer can effectively serve that client (or avoid having to serve him or her, which is sometimes wise).

EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT

First, on the planet where these beings were raised, to state a desideratum clearly is considered in itself a laudable accomplishment. That's right: saying those selfish words "I want..." triggers a response of parental praise, not a cuff on the ear or smack across the face as in earlier generations. When they say "I want" they don't expect you to be appalled or incredulous: they truly expect you to stroke, praise and reinforce them, and to clap your hands with glee. It's not so outlandish, really. One saw creatures like this from time to time in earlier generations, among only-children, from privileged backgrounds, who were raised by doting parents. They sometimes had no idea that their parents were kind or indulgent, and somehow never went through much of a maturing process when they got out in the real world. Though rare, the phenomenon did show up from time to time.

So how did a whole generation get so spoiled later on? First, there are so many more only-children now. And when a yuppie child has a sibling it is hardly ever more than one. The experience of having to measure one's needs and desires against the competing needs and desires of a number of other children in the same household is largely missing today. The perspective afforded by constant sharing of resources with a large number of siblings is simply not there.

BASIC ENTITLEMENT THEORY

Furthermore, despite all the recessions, we still live in a high-pressure consumption-driven surplus economy. Consuming is everywhere encouraged as a virtuous act, even if the commodity expended is credit. "You owe it to yourself" is the message pushed by advertisers everywhere.

And in all but the poorest families (and we are not talking about the poorest families, are we?) the new adults coming along today are already of a generation that has hardly known longing and desire. In many cases they never had to pine away for a doll or a bike, a guitar, or a car, and they sure never had to mow lawns, collect old bottles, and save up pennies for it. They never even had to experience longing for sex. They never learned basic postponement of gratification, much less progressive displacement of goals. Their elders were so eager to compete for their favor that these poor kids never had a chance to desire a material possession or a unit of fun: their elders were constantly asking them wouldn't they like such and such a present. Of course in divorced families of origin -- now already a universal phenomenon -- this degrading parental competition was even worse.

Also, though they are history's greatest examples of self-respect, these people have been told constantly to worry about not having enough of it. After years of indoctrination in storm-trooper-style pep rallies at their schools and day care centers, these kids have self-esteem in ample measure. In fact they are wallowing in it. They esteem themselves quite highly. It's having a decent respect for the rest of the human species that they have such a profound problem with.

SELF-ESTEEM APLENTY

Furthermore, it is difficult to counter monumental solipsism in people who have never had any superior beings to acknowledge. They have no gods of course, and the media figures they may be inclined to worship are quickly blown away by the winds of fashion. All public figures must be off their dignity, and even at that they serve as nothing but material for scandal, exposure, and the kind of debunking that is designed to make every individual with the intelligence to operate a TV clicker feel superior to them.

Most importantly of all, these clients have never perceived parents as a source of authority. At the very best, their parents competed for their affections, against the inevitable time of divorce when the child was supposed to side with whichever parent had most effectively wooed and bribed it, and join in treating the other parent as a total non-person. Though parents in the years when these kids were raised had not yet been forbidden to punish, as they are now, all of society did encourage the parent to avoid being an authority figure at all costs, and to concentrate on being a pal.

What do you do with such a client? How do you prepare such a client to go into negotiation, mediation or litigation? You can try to educate them about the realities of the world. You can preach at them about there being others whose desire is just as intense as theirs, who might somehow prevail, and I wish you good luck. Seldom, I think, have I made such a message sink in.

DON'T BUY IN

Mainly you have to leave it to the judge. The judge of course won't understand. And some will think that surely if the judge had only understood exactly what the client's desire was (your fault again), the case would have turned out differently. And of course you will have done your very very best to convey to the judge the exact dimensions of your client's desire, along with the more objective reasons why your client should prevail.

What you must not do, though, is to feed this wildfire of expectation. You must at all costs do your best to avoid buying into the client's habits of thought, and encouraging unrealistic expectations that reality cannot match. All too likely, any disappointment of client expectations will ultimately be blamed on you.

SOME BASIC TRAINING

Mainly you just have to keep trying to temper expectations with some objective view of the matter. You should not hesitate to say that one reason the other side may just, against all right and justice, prevail, is that there is another lawyer just as learned and skillful as you arguing his or her very hardest to get that other client what he or she wants. And since judges are not entirely perfect, it might just possibly happen that the judge may be carried away by the sweeping power of this opposing rhetoric and unfortunately be taken in.

And subtly, politely, and when appropriate, not so politely, you have to insinuate the thought that maybe it won't be rhetoric, but the facts, that will turn the judge against us if this client doesn't clean up his act.

It is necessary to keep trying to drag the client back far enough to see the big picture. These persons are, after all, not entirely without objectivity. They have been trained to empathize with the feelings of marginalized and oppressed persons of every stripe, worldwide. It is just the ex-spouse or estranged spouse, that person with whom they have exchanged vows, been physically intimate, and created children, who is regarded as no longer a qualified member of the human species, deserving of less respect than a mad dog. It is only that person whose utterances are mere noise, to be psychoanalyzed rather than listened to, who fails to qualify for minimal human dignity and deserves to be relegated to a concentration camp, machine-gunned down, buried in a mass grave by a bulldozer, etc., etc.

These people are fanatics, but only in their own personal cause. These people think in absolutes, and to speak of tolerance, slippage, ranges of acceptability, imperfection, submission to the dictates of fate, and, God forbid, compromise, is worse than treason. Especially in certain highly sensitive areas such as safety, security and control, such temporizing is regarded as an utterance practically as unacceptable as obscenity. The Prussianization of thought in these areas is so complete as to make the thought of imperfection utterly repugnant. To give voice to the thought that the judge might not find your client, her desires and her position as thrilling as the client finds it is to give mortal offense. It is to attack the client's whole world and value system. However, it sometimes must be done, in hopes of tempering wildly inflated expectations before the judge has to do it.

Just remember, however, that these folk have spent years being told how neat they are -- building up that self-esteem. So when a perfect person is disappointed, she's not likely to think the fault lies in herself -- nor even in the stars. It's probably going to lie in you. When seeking to lower expectations, try to anticipate and prevent the natural rationalization that you are talking disappointment just to cover up your own non-feasance and inadequacies. You must be constantly aware of this need in everything you say.

OTHER OUTLANDISH FOLKWAYS

The like totally yupped-out are not like you and me. Let's hope. And there are certain other distinctive folkways that you've got to be aware of. They talk in clichés, just as I am sure persons of other generations did, but their clichés are somehow different. One from those other generations that you never, ever hear is "It's a free country," which used to imply that one must accept others' untoward behavior with a certain degree of tolerance because that sacrifice is necessary to have freedom. Indeed freedom is no longer seen as a desirable social good to be sacrificed for in our society. Nor do you hear "Live and let live," or even "It takes all kinds," or "I guess that's life (that's fate), or (that's the breaks)." No, this would imply an uncourageous and compromising failure in the fanatical quest for accept-no-substitutes total quality. Rather, the buzz-phrases here are things like "But I have to live my own life" -- whatever on earth that means. It's one of those phrases that insofar as it's accurate is so self-evident as to say nothing, and insofar as it says anything at all is dead wrong.

Shakespeare's "To thine own self be true" takes on a new meaning for these clients. As they will tell you again and again, they have to be true to themselves. Then they worry over whether they are being so. These people learn that from authoritative sources. They seem to attend seminars on how to become a thorough rotter in 10 easy lessons. The notion of sacrificing a little of your self-interest in the interest of keeping a family together -- an idea to which earlier generations of clients were so firmly attached that you could only pry it from their cold, dead fingers -- is one that is very hard to sell them on.

NO DECENCY, NO GUILT

And you'll note that the term selfish, once a withering term of condemnation, is hardly ever used anymore -- at least not by the younger client. They have been told that selfishness is good, and selfishness is the norm. Even when unloading on their spouses, they just don't see it as something to complain about. You think you're being boldly interventionist when you say "The problem is that you are a selfish person." The client's answer is "So?"

You may also find that your client lacks a certain sense of proportion. This is probably a natural outgrowth of years of being told that everyone is special. It may result from far too many years of being cooed over by parents who create an abnormal sense of attention to detail by talking about absolutely everything with an only child whom they desperately fear they will lose to adulthood. When these parents do not have to apportion that love and attention among three or four or five or six grown children, and modern conveniences give them the time to spend, it becomes only natural. So if you wonder why your clients can talk seriously and unashamedly about litigating for custody of a pet, you have to realize that the client has probably never had the opportunity to develop the sense of the relative importance of things that large families and a scarcity economy once tended to create. I know this could be wrong, since older generations have sometimes fought over lamps and sugar bowls, but it's my theory.

But I think you have to admit that selfishness carries no stigma anymore. I once had the honor of litigating, within the same month, alimony and child support cases against two men who could only be explained, as in final argument they were, as monsters of selfishness. And what wondrous, awesome prodigies they were, like the child born wearing Ray-Bans. Each was living with his Helping Professional girl friend (one psychologist, one psychiatrist).

One made around $200,000.00 a year and could not afford alimony or child support because he had to pay for his psychotherapy, and his toys. Asked why the personal grooming line on his income and expense statement was $600.00 a month, he assumed a wounded expression of righteous indignation and petulantly allowed that as a T.V. newsguy he dyes his hair (this was before we had the Presidential example to follow, and the figure did seem out of line). The other, making real good money too, said that he could not pay alimony or child support because of the thousands he had to pay each month for his thrice-weekly primal scream therapy.

You have to try, if at all possible, to let a judge savor details like this. If tipped off in advance (and not surprised, as with the hair-dye data), you want to bring them out slowly, though in a casual and understated manner, for the best dramatic impact. Sometimes the enormity of it is just too much for trier of fact to fully absorb if you let it come like a bombshell.

PARENTS AS PAWNS

Both these men engaged in wars of financial bribery to lure the children away from their mothers, however, and one had the shrewdness to kick the kid out the day after the child support order was voided. But needless to say, the children in both families were true experts at playing off the parents against one another. This brings out one very important point about the hearts and minds of the modern yuppie client population. With their enormous emotional and financial investment in spoiled children they are far more susceptible to heartless exploitation by their cynical brats than any generation has been before. Of course it's largely unconscious exploitation when the kids are young, cute and lovable. As they become adolescents, it is increasingly hard-hearted, materialistic and contemptuous.

And of course if there's anything you dislike about these clients you can take comfort in the fact that when they reap the whirlwind they have sown, the rottenness that their own parents created in them will be as nothing compared to what they will have to contend with from the generation they have raised -- but that's another story. However, you do have to be aware of the various leverages now being applied, and to realize that the irrational demands of children, often assiduously cultivated by the client parents, are what is really driving the divorce case now upon your desk. If this is happening, the sooner you can pick up on this practical reality the better.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Sometimes, when support is an issue and you are working through income and expense forms with your client, you will note that the client's monthly budget includes massive, shocking, ungodly amounts of expenditure on the child or children. You may then be further surprised to find not only that the opposing party is doing it too, but that this has long been accepted in the family. It is easier to understand when the parents are engaged in one of those obscene self-degradation contests competing for the children's favor, but all too often, it seems to have been a pattern established long before the marriage started to go. Turning kids loose in a shopping mall as a sort of playground is one thing, but some parents turn them loose in shopping malls with money. And while giving a child a cash allowance is a matter of individual family style and preference in this great land of cultural diversity, the idea that you absolutely have to give so huge a cash allowance that our society has children throwing hundred dollar bills around is sick. It's particularly sick when the client is in your office complaining about a desperate lack of money. You could go over the figures with the client and say something like "You have to know this is just not viable. This has got to stop," and the client often says something like "I know, I know, but we couldn't change that now: little Eric would never understand." However, you have to lecture these people about the practical considerations that flow from the poisonous combination of infancy, idleness and money, which is something that most of them have never thought upon. Often it helps to look soberly at the numbers, establish that there is no mistake and that it is absolutely true that the client or spouse makes this much money available to the child on a regular basis, and then say something like "Gosh, no wonder kids buy drugs."

Why go through this exercise? Because the client must be prepared for the possibility of running up against a judge who has no understanding or sympathy at all with these kinds of spending patterns. And as we know, judges don't feel they have to answer to anybody and might do anything. Sure the client may think that if the judge "takes the money away" it will be easier to blame the judge, but there is no guaranteeing that the child -- who doesn't have to answer to anybody either, really -- won't blame the parent. This is a long range-problem that will have to be worked on seriously, by the client. You owe it to the client to require some serious focus on this problem even if you can't force some drastic therapeutic measures.

THE SAFETY FACTOR

To understand fully what you are hearing you also have to appreciate the values that are sacred to this class of clients. If freedom has disappeared from the pantheon of abstractions they hold dear, certainly there is no doubt about the single-mindedness of their devotion to the one that has replaced it: safety. Benjamin Franklin's observation that they who would abandon essential liberty in order to gain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety is utterly beyond them. To understand it would require analysis of something too unpleasant for them to focus on. Safety is to them the ultimate principle of life, the most revered abstraction, and the argument that allows them to rationalize absolutely anything they want to do. This (plus the importance of having exactly what they want of course) is what they invoke when you ask them how they can purport to care about American jobs and then go out and buy a $65,000 German or Swedish car. They are capable of infinitely expanding the concept, so sometimes you must candidly ask: safety of what from what -- safety of your comfort level from the competing needs of an ex-spouse?

Of course no one wants to see physical harm to children from avoidable accidents (beyond those necessary to learning basic lessons about life's dangers, as the child Moses did with hot stuff -- once), but you will note that often these people are wildly parlaying some concept of safety into whole new areas by illogical and radical analogy. If you are not picking up on these undertones when you hear them you will be disadvantaged.

THE WONDERFUL PERMUTATIONS OF "ABUSE"

One thing to remember: The modern client is quite likely to mention that he or she was "abused," by the spouse -- or more likely, that the spouse "is abusive." Before that triggers traditional images of wife-beating in your mind, and before you grab your lance, jump on your figurative white horse and charge off in all directions, stop and ask a few questions.

Most lawyers have a built-in, almost visceral reaction to revelations of domestic physical abuse, and the first mention of this new factor sometimes shifts the whole perspective from which a lawyer listens to the interviewee. But you have to watch this. Nowadays the term "abuse" is one of those thoroughly corrupted words that simply means all things to all people. Even though criminal liability of the severest imaginable sort attaches, people feel free to throw the word around with wild abandon, using psycho-logical truth, poetic reasoning, artistic license and adventures in creative definition. You had better stop the client right then and there and ask for a definition of "abuse" as the client intends it should be used. Then ask precisely what physical acts are being referred to. You may well find that the absent spouse who "is abusive," and "comes from an abusive background," has committed such outrages as "the silent treatment," or "withholding affection," persisting in trying to talk to the parties' child by phone, mentioning the client's adultery, not paying a utility bill, threatening not to feed a pet, or refusing to vacate the premises until there is some serious talk about a separation agreement. Some men have the most hideous tales of physical abuse to tell, and the scars to show for it, but there are others who talk of being abused and then, when pressed for the physical details, say something like "Well, she passive-aggressed me."

Once you create categories of "mental abuse" and "emotional abuse," the permutations into which the concept of abuse can flow are many and wondrous to behold. Of course, as has been true for centuries, spouses can viciously abuse each other in mental and emotional ways without getting physical at all. Many long-suffering spouses who have performed superhuman feats of restraint to avoid being goaded into laying a finger on the other spouse can certainly testify to that. However, what was once regarded as rudeness, incivility and cruelty is now no longer known by those honest words: it's all "abuse" to the modern client of today. All of which might be of little significance if it had not been for the fact that legislatures over the past decade have become absolutely besotted with the concept of turning "abuse" into a legal term.

So it's true that mental and emotional abuse, under one label or another have been around as long as marriage has, but with the easy availability of divorce today, spouses who know they won't have to live with the other spouse forever make very few accommodations in order to get along, and begin to "abuse" like there was no tomorrow. Much ill treatment occurs, but you had better be sure you have a precise factual understanding of which kind your client or potential client is going on about.

These are all observations that may prove useful in understanding the modern client. And unless social attitudes change drastically, or you restrict yourself to serving a geriatric clientele, there are going to be more and more of these creatures appearing in your office. Some lawyers I know are quite confused and hampered by their inability to understand these attitudes that show up in the client population of today. But distasteful as the learning task may be, these are attitudes we all must strive to understand. Right now our task is to help such clients confront the very different attitudes of judges. In the not-too-distant future, we will have to take these client attitudes even more seriously. That's because we will start getting judges who fully share them.

Moral Responsibility

Last quarter's issue included an article directed toward helping family lawyers understand the psychology that drives modern clients, which may at times be a strange and unfathomable psychology to responsible professionals raised only a generation before. Serious communication problems can result when the lawyer does not understand some of this material. Last article focused on their perceived selfishness and the need for complete control in the client's relationship to the younger generation. This article examines certain aspects of the client population's feelings as to guilt, moral responsibility, and attitude toward the elder generation.

First, as to guilt. Of course we have seen guilt at work in matrimonial cases: the crippling load of artificial guilt that a self-effacing wife may feel because she can't ever satisfy a husband whose demands are unreasonable, but who knows how to play upon her guilt as on a fine musical instrument; the chivalrous gentleman of an earlier generation who feels such guilt over leaving a hopelessly unhappy marriage that he can't be talked out of giving away the store; the parent who nourishes absurd levels of guilt over failure to fulfill the incredibly unreasonable demands of spoiled children for attention and money; and of course the client who has done something pretty rotten and damn well ought to feel bad about it. Yet the clients of the late 20th Century -- at least those who are up with the times -- seem to have very few of these guilt-induced problems. In fact, they don't know from guilt. They don't want to hear about guilt. They know better than to feel any moral responsibility whatever.

Perhaps they learned this in school. Most people have always loved to rationalize their behavior. Perhaps that's even more true of those kinds of people who tend to find themselves in divorce situations. However, the difference today is that they now have many powerful and respected institutions of society helping them to do it. "You are not to blame" is a message we all want to hear and now we can hear it everywhere.

A wonderful example appears in a mass mailing sent out in August by the Women's Center of Vienna (Virginia), an enormously successful one-stop answer shop operation that charges money for workshops and lectures on a vast range of things that women -- particularly those who have just ended a marriage or plan to do so -- want to hear about themselves.

Under a portrait of a sad-looking, totally innocent and drop-dead cute infant one reads: "Healing a Painful Childhood. $16.00. Did your parents constantly criticize you? Did they abuse you -- physically or emotionally? Did they put their needs first and relate to you in destructive ways? Did you wish they didn't drink so much or use drugs? Maybe they pretended that nothing was wrong? [sic.] Did you end up taking care of them because of their problems?"

Then after a paragraph break the exhortation continues "As adults we may know what we don't want to be like, yet find ourselves behaving in self-defeating and destructive ways. You are not to blame for what happened to you as a child. As an adult now, you can take positive steps to heal the pain. Women's Center therapist Nadine Lupton, M.S. [sic.], will present a workshop focusing on positive steps you can take to overcome the painful past and begin to enjoy your life as your own person. Follow-up support groups and counseling services will be offered."

Now every sentence of this deserves to be re-read, and read separately and individually, so as to savor the unique moral circuitry of each one.

This kind of propaganda helps to explain the attitudes we view with alarm in those clients we tend to encounter and to unfeelingly describe as moral morons. The fellow who can't pay child support because he's paid his rent 18 months ahead and has to keep up the payments on his girl friend's new Mercedes, or who can't afford to help with his child's college because he's into therapy which meets twice weekly and is quite expensive, for example.

Then, too adults used to spend time wondering if they had done right by the parents who bore, fed, clothed, educated and indulged them, and might now be aged, impecunious and infirm. But now we are strongly encouraged to reflect and discover that they "abused" us, and accordingly have no legitimate claims on our charity -- nay even our mere patience or indulgence. None at all. How do we do that? By finding ways in which they can be accused of having "put their own needs first." We are in fact exhorted to recall that they "related to us in destructive ways" (whatever that means), and maybe that they drank and used drugs -- which of course none of us would ever do (though if we do it's all their fault).

And just to be sure that your poor aged P.s didn't do anything right, the therapist has them bracketed coming and going. Perhaps they "constantly criticized you." But if not, then they may have committed the most unpardonable sin of all. "Maybe they pretended that nothing was wrong? [sic]" And finally, the crowning iniquity and touchstone of resentment: "Did you end up taking care of them because of their problems?"

Obviously from the wording of this, if you did end up taking care of "Them," it has to have been because of "their problems." And obviously too, if they had "problems" those problems have to be a fair and just retribution for their sins. The chain of hard-hitting preceding sentences makes that conclusion inescapable.

If there was ever a hate rally on paper this is it, and those modern adults who have spent time honestly worrying about how they will take care of aged and ailing parents are nothing but fools. What you want to do is blame them: blame them for everything you ever did wrong and everything that ever went wrong in your life. Needless to say, the fault cannot, cannot, cannot be your own. And you thought the Menendez trial was an aberration.

What such nonsense illustrates for the family lawyer is not so much the horrors that await the older and only-slightly-older generation (and of course our own), so much as the present generation's total flight from moral responsibility. If you "find yourself behaving in self-defeating and destructive ways (which is closest we will get to mentioning selfish behavior that hurts other people), then, the ad hastens to tell us, "you are not to blame."

It's interesting that the very next sentence following upon the "self-defeating and destructive ways" is "You are not to blame for what happened to you as a child." It doesn't even have to be said, but apparently is assumed, that the only possible reason for your behaving badly would have to be what happened in your childhood -- and of course "You are not to blame" for that. Of course children, as we all know, don't do things. What they might appear to be doing is only something which has "happened to" them. This is why any parent today who tried to curb a child's gloriously uninhibited self-expression by stopping a kid from pouring out the orange juice or hitting little brother with a hammer is guilty of "putting her own needs first." The parent who won't give the teenage kid the car keys (or buy him his own car) is surely doing the same awful thing.

With reasoning like this it certainly isn't hard to rationalize any rotten, selfish thing you happen to want to do. This is why it can be so very hard to get modern clients to understand why an unenlightened judge may take a dim view of their behavior. The client who likes to wallow in self-pity and blame everyone else in sight may not make a big hit with the judge -- particularly an experienced and smart judge -- but you'll have a very hard time convincing her of that. But even more importantly to the lawyer, the client who can't accept responsibility for anything is a client you don't want. The wrong decision will have been your wrong decision, and a result of your bad advice or non-advice. Blaming everyone in sight often includes blaming a lawyer first of all -- even before the client's parents.

Indeed one wonders how a person who so rejects the entire idea of moral responsibility can ever teach it -- as, for instance, in trying to teach right and wrong to his or her own child. Apparently there is no right and wrong, though, because the use of such "judgmental" words must be scrupulously avoided by those who believe children are never to blame. And indeed, with a welfare department which has the power to take one's children away, or get a parent convicted of the most infamous crimes, and which has defined child abuse to include not only spanking but standing in the corner, "time out," and withdrawal of T.V. privileges, the very idea of trying to teach children to follow any rules at all must be irretrievably passé.

There have always been occasional cases in which marriages broke up over the two parents' widely differing ideas of how to discipline the children. Some of the bizarre ideas that are around today must create fertile ground for the growth of such disputes. And since the passionately-held ideas about child raising such as those quoted above are stated in such uncompromising absolutes, one can hardly expect any marriage not to break up, or such divergences of opinion to be smoothed over (i.e., "pretending there is nothing wrong") in coming years.

But how to handle such pre-Edenic individuals when you are forced to take them to court with you? The first answer is probably: Don't fight it. That's right: don't oppose this attitude if you don't have to. In other words, you need to bear in mind that with modern judges it is possible to get quite a bit of mileage out of the moral-irresponsibility claims of at least a part of this uniquely innocent population. If they say they are not to blame for anything, the odds are probably favorable that you can find some expert somewhere who, for any one of a number of neat-sounding reasons, will say just that. Even without the help of experts, the client who can somehow manage to say that he's dependent, co-dependent, addicted, mentally ill and getting therapy, or whatever, can sometimes tap great wells of sympathy with a judge. Judges like to demonstrate that they are wise enough to know that alcohol and drug dependencies "are an illness." And as for the other dependencies, if the claim is raised, and there is not a psychological expert on the other side to say it's hogwash, then who are they, as mere judges, to say it isn't scientifically valid? That is an awesome responsibility they would rather not take on.

But for the incurably callous spouse who has done some rotten selfish things, can't accept moral responsibility, but is not a good enough actor to get up and give the standard apology of the '90s ("I'm dependent, I'm co-dependent, it's an illness, it's a tragedy, let the healing begin!"), you had better develop a healthy fear of the judge's adopting a judgmental attitude, and try to keep that client off the stand. Maybe you yourself have the requisite talent to make the "It's a tragedy" argument. Just remember, however, that in domestic relations cases it can be hard to keep the client off the stand. Have the client testify on the narrowest scope of issues possible, and loudly object to cross-examination that exceeds the scope of direct. Sometimes it will work.

Surely we can expect to see a lot more of these prelapsarian attitudes on the part of clients in coming years, with all the profoundly troubling implications for our ancient legal system that that entails. Illustrating a phenomenon of cultural transmission that has been seen again and again in Virginia, we seem to pick up the fads that roll in from the West Coast only after they have run their course and are already discredited out there. Now that the foolish ideas of the deconstructionists and semioticians are being openly and consistently ridiculed in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, they are only beginning to establish their oppressively wooden hegemony among the ignorant and the isolated, down at the operating level, in the Vast Interior of this country. They are beginning to be, in a very simplified form, adopted by local governments, enforced by social workers, and taught in elementary school.

Thus we can look forward to at least another generation believing, as strongly as they believe anything, that all distinctions are improper discrimination, that all ideas are of equal value and hence of equal validity, that there is no correct and incorrect (expect political of course), no right and wrong, no true and false, no sense and nonsense -- and that to say so would be discrimination. And yet the law continues to operate on the basis of making distinctions: right and wrong, and all the other ones. Its whole meaning is that there must be rules that everyone understands the same way, that one can remember (or find) and safely abide by. Distinctions, by placing one thing within an official definition and another without, are the very life of the law, insofar as it is law and not something else.

Of course this may gradually change as more and more judges are eager to demonstrate that they are up-to-date and with it, but for some years to come the law will continue to be judgmental and to look for right and wrong. As you sit with your client, making litigation decisions, taking information for pleadings, and preparing for a hearing, you will have to help these two different cultures to talk to each other. You will have to try to help your client see at least some right and wrong in his or her supposedly neutral conduct. Of course you will have to explain to the client why you are doing this, in order to curry favor with the antiquated judge. You will have to ask the client to search his deepest memories for some residuum of moral teaching by his parents, however much condemned and discredited such teachings are by modern theorists. You will probably even have to teach your client how to display or simulate contrition. For a while at least, the client who can admit wrongdoing, deal with it appropriately, and then go on to more favorable things, is often going to do better. That is, such a client will do better on the stand, at least with a wise and decent judge, than the totally self-righteous one whose moral blind spot is just too obvious.