According to a Harris poll of 1,029 adults conducted for the American Bar Association,

"Three-quarters of the people surveyed for the American Bar Association disagreed with the notion that jury service is a hardship to be dodged.

...More than 60 percent of those polled for ABA had been called for jury service. The poll found:

-Three in four people would prefer that their cases be decided by juries instead of judges.

-About half believe jurors are treated well by courts.

-Nearly 60 percent look forward to jury service."

(Source: Gina Holland, "Poll Finds Americans Don't Mind Jury Duty," The Associated Press, August 8, 2004.)

"Marriage used to be for life, with divorce either impossible or to be obtained only under burdensome conditions. But the control of the exit out of marriage has been much relaxed, and the dissolution of a marriage by divorce has become just as normal as the dissolution by death." 

(Source: Harry Willekens and Kirsten Scheiwe, "Introduction: The Deep Roots, Stirring Present, and Uncertain Future of Family Law," Journal of Family Law 28.1[2003]: 5-14.)

No one wins warmer applause from the nation's divorce lawyers than the feminist activists working hard to eliminate the gender gap in pay for out-of-home employment. For when sociologist Stacy J. Rogers of the Pennsylvania State University recently investigated the economic determinants of divorce, she concluded that divorce lawyers find their best employment prospects among couples in which the traditional breadwinner/homemaker complementarity has entirely given way to a labor-market egalitarianism in which breadwinning responsibilities are equally shared by husband and wife.

Using data collected between 1980 and 1997 from a randomly selected sample of adults who were married at the beginning of the study period, Rogers examined the relationship between marital stability on the one hand and husbands' and wives' employment income on the other.  As evidence for the relative stability of the traditional husband-as-breadwinner marriage, Rogers reports that "increases in husbands' income were associated with lower odds of divorce," while-in marked contrast-"each $1,000 increase in wives' actual income ... or each percentage point increase in wives' income [as a percentage of total household income] increases the annual odds of divorce by approximately 2.5 to 3%."

Rogers further highlights data indicating that "the risk of divorce is highest when wives' contributions [to household income] are similar to their husbands'."

Rogers cogently interprets her findings as evidence that divorce grows "more likely" when "there is less specialization and interdependence in the marriage."  In adumbrating this perspective, Rogers cites a 1999 study suggesting that when husband and wife are both employed in equally remunerative jobs, "a specialization and interdependence model [of marriage] may be replaced by an equality model, at least in the mind of one spouse."  And the "equality model" of marriage often leads to divorce because it entails unceasing anxiety about "equitable power relationships" maintained only through vigilant  "monitoring of parents' resources and [through] periodic renegotiation of arrangements to maintain equity." 

It can only delight divorce lawyers that Rogers sees "a growing group of marriages" in which "each spouse contributes between 40% and 59% of the total family income."