There was a pretty interesting court decision made recently in the case of a divorce. This was reported in the DailyMail, so you can find out more about it on there, but basically it is the first example of a court decision ever declaring that all of the property from the marriage needs to go to the wife.
If we look at why this happened, then you first need to understand some details of the case. The husband was a doctor (so pretty well-off), and one day he left his wife and two children and moved to Saudi Arabia, where he got remarried and had a young child, all without any continuing financial support for the family he left behind. So what we have is a case of abandonment, adultery and bigamy. Normally in cases like these there would be varying degrees of preferential treatment shown to the spouse not in fault, but this is still the first case of a judge ever reaching the decision that all of the estate needs to go to that spouse. It also has the added complication of the husband being in a foreign country so it could be difficult for the courts to force monthly alimony and child support payments, so having the whole estate (roughly worth £550,000) given to the wife was basically done because of this.
