The Sleepwalker\u27s Tour of Divorce Law

It\u27s amazing what you can learn about modern divorce law from Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler. Copernicus was the 16th century churchman who dared to suggest that the sun, not the earth, lies at the center of the solar system. Kepler was the early-17th century mathematician whose three laws of planetary motion provided the foundation for modern cosmology. Neither of these pioneers had a clue what he was doing. A study of recent procedures, decisions, and statutes in Maine divorce law suggests that nothing has changed since Copernicus. Koestler could have written the same book just by attending a divorce hearing in any Maine court or reading Skelton v. Skelton. We bumble along without a clue where our divorce law is headed and only later--sometimes a long time later--do we turn around and realize what we\u27ve done. That\u27s my thesis: that we can learn a lot, and save a lot of embarrassment, by studying Koestler\u27s thesis

Toward a Coherent Interpretation of Maine\u27s Marital Property Act

Interpreted literally, Maine\u27s Marital Property Act (MPA) excludes all wedding gifts from the marital estates of divorcing spouses. Wedding gifts received before a wedding are nonmarital because they were not received during the marriage. Wedding gifts received after a wedding are nonmarital because they were gifts, which appear to be expressly excluded from the marital estate by the statute\u27s definition of marital property. In short, a literal reading of the MPA prevents Maine\u27s divorce courts from exercising any discretion in the distribution of what must, by any measure of common sense, be quintessential examples of marital property. This curious state of affairs is the product of inadequate draftsmanship of § 307 of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (UMDA), of which §722-A(1) of the MPA is virtually the verbatim derivative. While those deficiencies have drawn plenty of fire from within and without Maine, it is not the purpose of this article to add to that literature. Instead, this article treats the MPA as a fait accompli: The Legislature chose to adopt it years ago, and has scarcely changed any of its principal provisions since, so it is probably here to stay. The challenge, then, is not to criticize it but to work with it: to advance its apparent objectives without stumbling over its many idiosyncrasies. This article attempts to resolve the problem of one of those idiosyncrasies

Global electric field determination in the Earth's outer magnetosphere using charged particles

Although many properties of the Earth's magnetosphere have been measured and quantified in the past 30 years since it was discovered, one fundamental (for a zeroeth order magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium) measurement was made infrequently and with poor spatial coverage: the global electric field. This oversight is in part due to the difficulty of measuring a plasma electric field, and in part due to the difficulty of measuring a plasma electric field, and in part due to the neglect of theorists. However, there is renewed interest in the convection electric field, since it has been realized that it is vital for understanding many aspects of the magnetosphere: the global MHD equilibrium, reconnection rates, Region 2 Birkeland currents, magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, ring current and radiation belt transport, substorm injections, acceleration mechanisms, etc. Unfortunately the standard experimental methods have not been able to synthesize a global field (excepting the pioneering work of McIlwain's geostationary models), and we are left with an overly simplistic theoretical field, the Volland-Stern electric field mode. Again, single point measurements of the plasma pause were used to infer the appropriate amplitudes of the model, parameterized by Kp (Maynard & Chen, JGR 1975). Although this result was never intended to be the definitive electric field model, it has gone nearly unchanged for 15 years. However, the data sets being taken today require a great deal more accuracy than can be provided by the Volland-Stern model. Nor has the variability of the electric field shielding been properly addressed, although effects of penetrating magnetospheric electric fields has been seen in mid- and low-latitude ionospheric data sets. The growing interests in substorm dynamics also requires a much better assessment of the electric fields responsible for particle injections. Thus, we proposed and developed algorithms for extracting electric fields from particle data taken in the earth's magnetosphere. As a test of the effectiveness of these techniques, we analyzed data taken by the AMPTE/CCE spacecraft in equatorial orbit between 1984-1988. Some analytic tools had to be developed before construction of computer algorithms, and they are discussed