An Unrepresented Man's Odyssey in Divorce Court: A Case Study of Divorce in Minnesota carried through a successful Appeal

This is the story of a 70-year-old man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who was served with divorce papers by his 56-year-old Chinese-born wife of eleven years. She has an attorney; he hires one. The couple had no children together and few financial resources other than real estate acquired before the marriage.

After seven months of fruitless bickering during which his financial resources have been depleted, the husband is forced to represent himself without an attorney. This begins a seven-month process of dealing with various tricks played upon him by the other attorney. He is twice arrested for domestic abuse on bogus charges. (The city prosecutor later drops the charges against him.) He is forced to respond to a series of letters to the court containing false accusations. A hostile judge, who happens to be the chief judge of Hennepin County, presides over a two-day trial marked with shenanigans involving court-appointed Chinese-language interpreters and frequent judicial interference. The result is that the judge orders the husband to assume all of the more than $300,000 debt accumulated during the marriage, orders the husband to pay $500 in permanent alimony, and awards the wife $50,000 of the husband's non-marital property.

The husband bones up on the law at law libraries. He files a lengthy post-trial motion to amend findings of fact and conclusions of law, which results in two small concessions. He then files an appeal to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. Although such attempts by self-represented persons seldom succeed, the appeal does result in overturning the requirement to pay $50,000 from sale of his non-marital real estate. The Minnesota Supreme Court refuses to revisit the alimony award.

This book will be useful to persons (especially men) who wish to represent themselves in divorce proceedings in that it lays out the general process in Minnesota divorce courts and presents specific documents used in appealing lower-court rulings. Its narrative will also be of interest to students of the judicial system, focusing on the hard-ball tactics played by some attorneys and the abusive use of discretion by certain judges. This well-written narrative gives an interior view of the divorce process, both from a legal and personal perspective.

For self-represented litigants in Minnesota, this book will be useful in providing models for papers needing to be filed and explanations of relevant court rules. For attorneys, it shows how some non-attorneys think.