U.S. Legal System Directory: Purpose and Scope

The U.S. legal system governing divorce and family dissolution operates across 50 state jurisdictions, each maintaining independent statutory codes, procedural rules, and court structures — with federal law intersecting on discrete issues such as retirement asset division and interstate child support enforcement. This directory maps that landscape by organizing reference entries across the full scope of U.S. divorce law, from foundational jurisdictional concepts to post-decree enforcement mechanisms. The entries collected here serve attorneys, researchers, self-represented litigants, and policy analysts who require structured access to primary legal frameworks and procedural standards. For a grounding in the substantive law underlying this directory, the Divorce Law Overview: U.S. article establishes the baseline concepts against which individual directory entries are measured.

How entries are determined

Directory entries are selected based on legal relevance to divorce and family dissolution proceedings as defined under state statutory codes and recognized uniform acts. The primary selection criteria are:

1. Statutory or regulatory basis — The subject must be addressed by a named statute, uniform act, federal regulation, or published court rule. Entries derived from informal practice alone are excluded.
2. Jurisdictional scope — Subjects must apply across a meaningful portion of U.S. jurisdictions — typically enacted in 25 or more states — or must represent a federally operative framework (e.g., QDRO rules for retirement assets under ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code).
3. Procedural or substantive classification — Each entry is classified as either procedural (governing how a legal action is conducted) or substantive (governing the legal rights and obligations at stake). This distinction mirrors the framework used by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) in drafting uniform family law acts.
4. Public source availability — The underlying law must be traceable to a publicly accessible source: state code repositories (e.g., Westlaw state statutes, official legislature portals), the ULC's published uniform acts at uniformlaws.org, or federal agency publications through sources such as the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Department of Labor, or the Social Security Administration.
5. Independence from legal advice — Entries are excluded when the subject cannot be described in reference terms without constituting jurisdiction-specific legal counsel.

Entries are not ranked by frequency of litigation or case volume. The directory treats a narrowly applicable subject — such as covenant marriage divorce restrictions, operative in 3 states (Arizona, Arkansas, and Louisiana) — with the same structural rigor as a universally applicable subject such as child custody law.

Geographic coverage

This directory covers all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Territorial jurisdictions (Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa) maintain separate family law codes and are not covered in the main directory entries, though federal statutes that apply in territories are noted where relevant.

Coverage distinguishes between three categories of legal geography:

• Uniform act jurisdictions — States that have adopted a named uniform act with minimal modification, such as the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA) or the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA). As of the ULC's published adoption records, UIFSA has been adopted in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, making it the broadest uniform family law framework in operation.
• Community property states — 9 states (Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin) apply community property principles to marital asset division, a framework examined in detail at Community Property States: Divorce.
• Equitable distribution states — The remaining 41 states apply equitable distribution, a standard addressed at Equitable Distribution States.

Federal law intersects with state divorce proceedings in bounded, well-defined domains: the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) governs retirement plan division; Title IV-D of the Social Security Act funds and regulates child support enforcement; and the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) establishes procedural protections relevant to military divorce proceedings. Entries covering federal intersection points cite the applicable federal code section or agency authority directly.

How to use this resource

The directory is organized by subject cluster rather than alphabetically or by jurisdiction. Subject clusters reflect the sequential structure of divorce proceedings — from initial jurisdictional requirements and residency thresholds through the filing process, financial disclosure, property division, support determinations, and post-decree modification. A reader tracing a single proceeding from initiation to resolution can follow the cluster sequence as a structural roadmap.

Cross-references within entries link to related subjects where legal standards overlap. For example, entries on spousal support and alimony law cross-reference divorce tax implications because Internal Revenue Code §71 (pre-2019 agreements) and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 directly affect the financial structure of support awards.

The Divorce Law Glossary provides standardized definitions for technical terms used consistently across all entries. Defined terms in the glossary align with definitions published by the ULC, the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct (where attorney conduct is discussed), and federal agency publications where federal law applies.

Standards for inclusion

Inclusion standards are applied uniformly regardless of how frequently a subject arises in litigation. The governing criteria are traceability, scope, and reference utility.

Traceability requires that every factual claim within a directory entry can be traced to a named primary source — a statute, a published court rule, a federal regulation codified in the Code of Federal Regulations, or a uniform act text published by the ULC. Secondary sources (law review articles, practitioner guides) are not used as the basis for factual claims.

Scope requires that a subject either (a) applies in 10 or more U.S. jurisdictions, (b) constitutes a federal rule with nationwide effect, or (c) represents a legally significant variant — such as annulment vs. divorce or legal separation vs. divorce — where the distinction carries substantive legal consequences for the parties involved.

Reference utility requires that an entry provides information a reader cannot retrieve by reading a single statute in isolation — it must contextualize the legal standard, identify the governing authority, and note jurisdictional variance where it exists. Entries that restate a single statute without analytical framing are revised or removed during editorial review.

No entry constitutes legal advice, an attorney referral, or a jurisdiction-specific legal opinion. The pro se divorce resource entry, for example, describes the procedural framework courts apply to self-represented litigants under published court rules — it does not recommend self-representation as a strategy in any given proceeding. That distinction defines the operational boundary between reference content and legal counsel across every entry in this directory.