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On Valentine's Day, I saw the story about hundreds of people not only getting married in Las Vegas, but actually buying their licenses at a kiosk in baggage claim at the airport! I wondered how long those marriages will last, which got me to thinking that Nevada was known for easy divorces. Will those couples get their quickie divorces at baggage claim?
Funny. And it got us to remembering something we heard along the way that resonated: that society has it exactly backwards. Getting married should be as hard as it is to get divorced, while getting divorced should be as easy as it is to get married.
And no, though divorces are still as easy in Nevada as they've always been (and it's easier to get divorced elsewhere than ever), we don't see it happening at baggage claim -- or even anywhere in the airport. Natch.
We might be assuming more intent in the question than was invested and we've answered a variation of this question a couple times over the years, but here's the latest version of how Nevada became known as a divorce haven.
From the outset in the midst of the gold rush to California, some attraction was needed to counter the inhospitable climate and terrain in Nevada to encourage settlers. So the territorial government in Carson City (a hilarious description of which is found in Mark Twain's book Roughing It), and then the state government after 1864, started to establish itself as a renegade refuge that permitted activities other states prohibited.
In those days, many states had legal red-light districts, but Nevada never got around to outlawing most of its legal brothels.
In addition, in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the big cities of Reno, Carson, and Goldfield gained national notoriety when they hosted a handful of heavyweight championship boxing matches at a time when prizefights were banned in most other states.
It was divorce, however, rather than prostitution and prizefights, or even legalized wide-open gambling a few decades later, that put the Silver State on the map as a state that seemed to celebrate scandal and immorality, with Reno being the original "sin" city.
Prior to the twentieth century, divorce statutes in most states were extremely strict (in South Carolina, it wasn't permitted at all). Residency requirements were measured in years and even severe physical abuse wasn't always considered adequate grounds for dissolving a union. (As an aside, there was no such thing as marital rape; not until the 1970s did U.S. law get tough by criminalizing rape of a wife by a husband and the last states to criminalize it, Oklahoma and North Carolina, didn't do so until 1993.)
Hence, couples either chose to endure the misery of an unhappy marriage or were forced to make pilgrimages to one of the few states with more lenient divorce policies. By the early 20th century, these included Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada, which vied for the migratory divorce trade by lowering their residency requirements.
Nevada's marriage and divorce laws were established with the first territorial legislature in 1861 and carried over with little change when Nevada became a state in 1864. The residency period necessary to be a bona fide citizen was set at six months and seven grounds for divorce were allowed.
Relatively minor changes were made to Nevada's divorce law through the end of the 19th century, but then, in 1906, a society lawyer in New York, where divorce was permitted only on the grounds of adultery — which had to be proven in open court — hit on remote Reno, still little more than a whistle stop on the transcontinental railroad, as the perfect place for his high-profile clients to dissolve their marriages -- or get "Reno-vated," as the saying went -- away from the public spotlight. Overnight, Reno went full-on into the marriage-dissolution business, with hoteliers, brothels, and private homeowners cashing in by providing temporary lodging to those waiting out the residency requirement.
In 1927 the state legislature lowered the residency requirement to an unheard-of three months, and in 1931, the same year that gambling was legalized in response to the economic impact of the Great Depression, the requirement was lowered once more to what elsewhere was considered an outrageous and scandalous six weeks -- making it the most lenient divorce law in the Union. The radical move helped Reno survive the nation's economic collapse and in the 1930s, more than 30,000 divorces were granted at the Washoe County Courthouse, while by 1940 Nevada accounted for 49 out of 1,000 divorces in the United States.
Today, the residency requirement (for at lease one spouse) remains at six weeks, with the divorce becoming final after another six, and Nevada is a no-fault divorce state, making the law that much more liberal and non-intrusive. As in other ways, Las Vegas has long eclipsed Reno as the state's divorce mecca, although the number of divorces granted per annum was in decline the last time we saw any statistics.
Nevada is still considered the "quickie-divorce" capital, but bear in mind that it's also a community-property state, which means that most prenuptial contracts are void and spouses are expected to share equally in joint assets (those obtained after the ink on the license dried). In other words, half of that lottery you won last week, half of the ancestral mansion you inherited while married, and half the Maserati you splurged on with your recent gambling winnings automatically belong to your other half, while half of his/her debts belong to you.