Rules
Part of Divorces: what filing and decree dates establish
Why a divorces by year count reflects court calendars, not relationships
Divorces by year measure court calendars, not relationships. What each date in a case file records, why jurisdiction decides the year, and why counts mislead.
A divorce entry is dated by a court. That sounds like the strongest possible footing for a year page, and in one sense it is: there is a document, an office, and a date nobody has to guess at. The complication is what the date measures.
A court acts when its docket reaches the matter. That depends on the jurisdiction, the caseload, the procedural route and the calendar, and none of those are facts about the people in the case. A year page built on court dates is a picture of court throughput with names attached.
What to take away
- A celebrity divorce usually spans two or more yearsfiling in one, decree in another. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's ran from 2016 to 2019.
- Even the national divorce count is partialthe CDC's figure covers reporting states only.
- Publish the year page as an index of your holdings, with the evidence type per row, and leave counts out.
What the date on the file actually is
A case has several dates, and they can fall in different years without anything unusual happening.
What the date records
| Date | What it records | Who controls the timing |
|---|---|---|
| Filing | Date the petition is filed with the court | Filing party and court clerk |
| Service | Date the other spouse is formally served | Serving party or process server |
| Waiting-period expiry | Date a mandatory waiting period ends | Statute |
| Decree | Date the court enters judgment | Court |
| Reporting | Date the case appears in a public index | Court clerk or reporting office |
One case, several dates
- Filing datepetition submitted
- Service and responseother party notified, replied
- Hearing datescourt takes the matter up
- Judgment or decreecourt concludes the matter
- Entry or recordingclerk enters it in the record
The gap between the first and the last of those is routine and can be long. Where a jurisdiction imposes a waiting period, it is long by design. So the same matter can be filed in one year and concluded in the next, and both dates are correct.
The rule that keeps a year page honest is to file on the decree, index by the filing, and say in the row which date the heading used. What each part of a case file supports, and how to read one without over-reading it, is set out in the guide to divorces.
Jurisdiction decides more than the year
Grounds, waiting periods, residency requirements and procedural routes are all local, and they change what year a matter lands in. The general treatment of divorce sets out how varied those requirements are between jurisdictions, which is why a comparison across places is a comparison of legal systems.
In California, a couple must wait six months after service before a judgment can be entered; the rule is Family Code § 2339, and court checklists date the end of marital status at six months and one day from the jurisdiction date. At least one spouse must have lived in the state for six months before filing. That waiting period alone can push a filing from one year into the next.
Court structure varies. The federal judiciary's own explanation of the types of cases courts hear makes the division plain.
Family matters sit in state courts, so a chronology working across states is working across dozens of separate systems with their own rules and their own publication practices.
Two entries in the same year of your page can therefore rest on completely different processes. One concluded quickly in a jurisdiction with a short route. One took years elsewhere. Nothing about that difference belongs to the people involved, and a page that renders both as a plain row in a year invites a reader to think it does.
What a count cannot show about relationships
The number of rows in a year is determined by three things, and none of them is what a reader will take it to mean.
What a count cannot show
- Your coverage rule, which decides who is eligible for an entry at all.
- Access, which decides which jurisdictions you can actually see into.
- Attention, which decides which matters anyone told you about.
Change any of the three and the count changes without a single fact about the world changing. A count published anyway gets quoted without its caveats. The caveats are the entire content.
Even the official national figure carries this problem. The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics publishes the national number of divorces from provisional counts received from state health departments, and its headline divorce count covers 45 reporting states and D.C., not the whole country. It stopped collecting detailed divorce data beginning in January 1996. If the national statistic cannot count every state, a celebrity year page certainly cannot.
The general form of this problem, and why a denominator you do not have is worse than no denominator, is detailed in the notes on year slices.
What a year page can carry instead
Make it an index and say so on the page.
What a year page carries
- Evidence type on every row
- Date type for filing on every row
- Scope line naming reachable jurisdictions
- Scope line naming unreachable ones
- Last-reviewed date, separate from newest row
Each row gets an evidence type, so readers can see which entries rest on a court record and which rest on something weaker. Each row also gets a date type for filing, so the heading does not silently do work.
What a year page can carry
| Year | Entry | Evidence type | Date type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Case concluded, California | Court record | Decree |
Four celebrity divorces, filed by year
Real cases show why the heading has to name its date type.
- Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.Jolie filed for divorce on September 19, 2016, citing irreconcilable differences; the divorce became legal on April 12, 2019. Filing row 2016, decree row 2019, and nothing about the two and a half years between belongs to either heading.
- Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.Kardashian officially filed for divorce on February 19, 2021. In February 2022 she asked the Los Angeles Superior Court for quicker proceedings, and a post-divorce settlement was reached on November 29, 2022. Two calendar years, three rows.
- Jason Momoa and Lisa Bonet.They announced their split in January 2022. Bonet filed for divorce in January 2024, listing their date of separation as October 7, 2020, and the divorce was finalized on July 9, 2024. The separation date in the filing is more than three years earlier than the filing itself, and earlier than the announcement.
- Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen.They finalized their divorce on 28 October 2022, so the decree row is 2022.
Filed under the decree year, the year page reads 2019 (Pitt and Jolie), 2022 (Kardashian and West settlement; Brady and Bündchen), 2024 (Momoa and Bonet). Filed under the filing year, the first three read 2016, 2021 and 2024, and the Brady and Bündchen row needs its filing date from the docket before it can be placed. Both views are true; only a labeled heading tells the reader which one is on the page.
The page gets a scope line naming the jurisdictions you can reach and those you cannot. It also gets a last-reviewed date, separate from the newest row's date.
That page is useful and true, telling a reader what you hold, on what basis, and what you do not. It also survives late additions. They arrive constantly here because indexing lag is real, and a matter concluded years ago can surface at any time.
The way to add to a closed year without implying a correction is set out in the notes on how entries age.
What the year page must not do
Two temptations, both common.
The first is a trend line. A chart of rows per year across a decade looks like a finding and is a record of your own research effort. Publishing it invites exactly the interpretation the data cannot support.
The second is a ranking. Longest, shortest, fastest: each is arithmetic on dates whose precision and meaning vary by jurisdiction, and each turns a court's calendar into a claim about people.
Where a durational figure appears, state both endpoint types, and the guide to dates explains why mixed precision cannot simply be subtracted.
Common questions
Should the filing year or the decree year head the entry?
The decree year, because it is the year a court concluded something. The filing year belongs in the row, and both should be visible so nobody has to guess which one the heading used.
A case was concluded years ago and only surfaced now. Where does it go?
In its own year, with a note of when it entered your record. That is an addition, not a correction, and the distinction should be visible to a reader.
Can a year page compare jurisdictions?
Only by describing their rules, never by comparing counts. A jurisdiction with a shorter route produces faster conclusions, which says nothing about anybody in it.
What if the decree date and the reported date differ?
The court's date governs, and the reported date is a fact about the reporting. Where they differ by a year, record both and say which the row is filed under.
