Court Opinion

ID: 9694252
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 17:32:01.784325+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:58.124912
License: Public Domain

Brown, J.
(dissenting). The opinion of the majority states that an antenuptial contract is void, because contrary to public policy, if it purports to limit the husband’s liability in event of separation or divorce, regardless of the circumstances motivating its adoption or attending its execution. To express it another way, under no circumstances may the parties before marriage come to a valid agreement concerning the wife’s rights or the husband’s obligations in case the *130marriage is terminated by the courts. Until the court spoke I had not supposed that to be the public policy of this state nor do I believe it should be. On the contrary, in my view a wise public policy is opposed to so uncompromising a statement.
Public policy, of course, favors marriage and is concerned with its stability. I think it must be conceded that, in other relationships, contracts defining the expectations and responsibilities of the contracting parties promote stability. If they are desirable in other human activities there should be, at least, no presumption that they tend to promote discord in marriage. And even in marriage anyone’ can think of possible problems which it is well to be agreed upon before the ceremony. Yet the court holds that when an antenuptial agreement touches the financial provision, no matter how generous, by a husband for a wife in the event of divorce it is malum in se and shall be outlawed regardless of circumstances. Why ?
From some of the quotations appearing in the majority opinion it seems to be taken as a fact that if the parties know what the husband must give and the wife will get as a result of divorce one of them will be stimulated to misconduct or to an effort to be rid of the spouse. How this is known I cannot tell, and I doubt if it is so, but if it be true then it seems self-evident that a contract which so encourages one necessarily deters the other. And the one deterred may well be the one who needs that restraint. For example, and taking the husband as the culprit since that is assumed in the illustrations quoted in the principal opinion, suppose that a husband’s attention to his wife is wavering. It now appears to him that many of his domestic troubles are her fault. But there exists to his present regret a contract by which, in the days when he thought divorce would never intrude between them, he made what he now considers improvident and extravagant provision for her if that unlikely event ever came to pass. To *131me, at least, it seems clear that he will be deterred from beginning an action for divorce by reason of the financial penalty a successful suit would bring upon him and he will take care that his conduct gives his wife no ground for such a suit of her own. Suppose, again, a mature woman with property of her own, more than adequate for her support, and a man whose mother is dependent on him now and after his death if she survives him. He does not have enough income and will not leave enough property to provide support for his mother and the other woman, be she his wife, ex-wife, or widow, and he believes it is his first duty to make his mother secure, come what may. To the woman it is perfectly immaterial what he does with his money. She has no need of it and anticipates none and she will gladly enter into an agreement relinquishing her right to be supported by him. Although it is well established that she may give up her share of his estate in case of his death, the court now says that she may not do it in case of divorce, regardless of circumstances. Hence these people may not marry. I see no resulting benefit to society or any such requirement of public policy. Therefore it appears to me to be impossible to say dogmatically that the influence of such antenuptial agreements tends to destroy rather than to promote and conserve marriage. It depends on the circumstances of the individual case and I should suppose that public policy would require the circumstances to be considered before it could safely be announced that the influence of a particular antenuptial contract was evil.
The court says that the state has an interest in seeing that a husband performs his obligation to support his wife. Of course that is so; and it has an interest, too, in his provision for his widow, to the extent that we have a statute which secures to her not less than one third of his property. Yet public policy, as shown in many decisions by this court, approves antenuptial contracts limiting that obligation. It will *132not be asserted, I suppose, that the maintenance of one who has lost her husband by divorce is of more concern to the state than that of another who has lost hers by death; but if it is not, then such a contract which is prima jade valid in respect to the widow should be equally valid when it concerns the divorcee, so long as the ascertainable and reasonable effect of the agreement does not promote the dissolution of marriage which, as I have said and as this court said before me in Bibelhausen v. Bibelhausen (1915), 159 Wis. 365, 150 N. W. 516, will depend on the circumstances of the case.
The marriage in the instant case was, as the court found on ample evidence, a marriage of convenience between a man of sixty-two and a woman of fifty-six who had been his housekeeper for thirteen years. The woman testified “. . . he wanted that agreement drawn before he would get married.” Agreeing with the majority in its praise of the marriage relationship, it seems to me that this contract, whose supposed validity persuaded Mr. Fricke to add another buttress, albeit a temporary one, to the bulwark of civilization deserves a kinder word than it has received. That the marriage which the contract procured was not successful is not an answer. The marriage had a chance to succeed and the contract is not shown to have been responsible for its failure. Without the contract there would have been no marriage at all. Public policy does not require that an elderly woman desiring marriage must remain single if she cannot find a man who is willing to leave everything to chance and put his property at the disposal of the court, if someday a court thinks it proper to grant a divorce, but can find one with whom she can make mutually satisfactory agreements concerning a division of property in the same contingency. Believing that it should be the trial court’s business to judge the case according to the circumstances and to accord validity to such an antenuptial contract if it appears to have been made understandingly, fairly, and willingly, and in support, not in derogation, of *133marriage, I respectfully dissent from the majority who hold that under no circumstances may the parties contemplating marriage recognize divorce as a possibility (although the statutes themselves governing the marital state recognize it) and make financial provision for that contingency.
The Bibelhausen Case, supra, deals with that part of a prenuptial contract whose provisions apply in the event of the death of the husband and expressly left for future consideration agreements affecting the husband’s financial liability in case of divorce; but I consider that the opinion of the learned Mr. Justice Marshall is applicable also to contracts of the latter type. If the safeguards which he prescribes to be applied by the court are applied to the consideration of contracts like the present one, with the appropriate addition that it must also appear that the contract in question was not in fact an inducement to dissolution of the marriage, the true interests of public policy are well served. I do not believe they are, under a rule which prohibits such contracts under any and all circumstances.