Court Opinion

ID: 9610440
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:41:43.415168+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:02:59.561463
License: Public Domain

WOLFE, Chief Justice
(concurring).
I concur. One may favor a Court of Domestic Relations, which supposedly would be equipped with machinery for investigating the causes of marital derangements and have the power to mediate and reconcile. Many divorces might be prevented if causes of friction were diagnosed in time to prevent them from destroying the relationship. Competent social workers recognize that a sympathetic third party possessing intelligence and tact, who obtains the confidence of both parties, may be able to prevent a shipwreck of the marriage. If labor disputes may yield to mediation, marriage disputes may be capable of reconciliation; therefore, the need of a Court of Domestic Relations with a Department of Advice and Reconciliation as an adjunct. But in matters of domestic relations, the means and instrumentalities used in the process of reconciliation may be equally as important as the concept of reconciliation itself.
I do not think We can turn over to the individual members of the Bar the adjustment of marital difficulties for a fee. The lawyer may be “in his proper function” a “doc*87tor to the heart and the emotions” but lawyers are as varied as doctors. There are eminent doctors to whom no one would' refer a matter of strained domestic relations although I venture to say that the old type of family doctor who went into the home knew more about the family life of his patients and their emotional problems and was more often consulted regarding them than the lawyer will ever be and perhaps as much as was the minister and pastor.
The lawyer becomes by training, partisan. I agree that conscientious lawyers will endeavor to adjust marital difficulties rather than fan them into flame. But not every lawyer is so conscientious, and at best he is likely to be partisan; nor is there any assurance that he has the training or disposition to diagnose marital ills.
I have a high opinion of most members of the Bar, but I would not turn them loose promiscuously as “doctors to the heart and emotions” even if fees could not be charged for such services. And I cannot vote for a decision which permits the attorney to sue a spouse (I assume that the wife would also be suable for advice given to the husband if such advice were included as “necessaries”) for marital advice rendered under the heading of legal advice on the theory that the cost of obtaining such advice was permissible “expenses of the family” as that phrase is used in Sec. 40-2-9, U. C. A. 1943. Common sense, as I see it, speaks differently. I, therefore, concur in the opinion of Mr. Justice LATIMER.