Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net COMMUNITY PROPERTY BY ALFRED COPPEL _The first successful non-Terrestrial divorce case! Fame for Legal Eagle Jose Obanion for his generalship of a three-sexed, five Venusian history-shattering precedent! Habits are habits but--alas!--on Venus they differ...._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] One of these days an embittered lawyer is going to write a text on the effects of spaceflight on the divorce laws. This writer will be a Terrie, about five ten, with blue eyes, black hair--turning grey very fast, and the unlikely name of Jose Weinberg Obanion III. Me. I remember very well the day I was graduated from law school; the day my father gave me his version of the Obanion credo. _Always remember you live in a community property state--_ That simple phrase has kept three generations of Obanions in the divorce trade. And only I have had cause to regret it. Basically, I suppose, my troubles began the day the Subversive Party swept the Joe Macs out of Congress and repealed the Alien Restriction Act of 1998. That bit of log-rolling gave the franchise to almost all resident aliens and resulted in a situation virtually destroying the sanctity of divorce as an institution. I'm a Joe Mac myself--politically, I mean. Obanions have been voting the Joe Mac Party Ticket for more than a hundred years. Red is our color. There are even family legends that say an Obanion was with the first Joe Mac when he became President of that old unit the Euse of Aay. We have to rely on legends, unfortunately, because the Joe Mac Party traditionally fed their rally bonfires with books, and when they won the election and took over the Euse of Aay they had a rally to end all rallies and somehow the Government Archives--books, you see, as well as punch cards and the like--got taken over by some very zealous Party men. The records were always rather incomplete after that. Only word of mouth information was available during that first Joe Mac Administration, and that can be sketchy. For example, the party color is red. All we know is that first Joe Macs had something to do with red. You see how it goes. What I mean by all this, is that I can see the faults in my own Party. I'm no diehard. Nor am I a bad loser. The Subs won control of Congress by a landslide, so I guess the people wanted that sort of slipshod government. Only they should have been more careful, dammit, when they started tampering with the laws.