Divorcing husbands and wives look to the law for answers Moreover they not only expect that they will be given the right ones but that those answers will also be clear As a lawyer would put it the law must provide an appropriate balance between equity and certainty To be guaranteed that their answers will be the right ones our adversarial legal system insists on two things First they must be judged by a legal yardstick Second they must employ a particular method of validation The measuring must be done by separate lawyers rather than one Its justification for this is that the two of them have what it refers to as conflicting interests It is those conflicting interests so it claims that render it inappropriate for one lawyer to do the measuring Unfortunately the answers that the law provides are not clear Its method of validation is enough to guarantee that But suppose that they were not right either Suppose that it is not possible for the law s construct and the rules that it employs to give expression to that construct what it refers to as our equitable distribution laws to do equity In other words suppose that the most that the law can do is tell us what the wrong answer is not the right one Where would that leave us It would leave us where we now are with neither clear answers nor right ones This book argues that the very nature of our adversarial legal system and its method of validation is such that it necessarily favors equity over certainty Ironically since it is not possible for the law to give us the right answer what it leaves us with is neither In other words the law fails divorcing husbands and wives on both counts It does not help them to get it right And it does not help them get it done For that reason the sad legacy that our adversarial legal system has bequeathed to divorcing husbands and wives is simply to have given them false levels of expectation that are then inevitably followed by equivalent levels of dis