Betty A. Thompson | Va. divorce lawyer, 88

Posted: September 29, 2012

Betty A. Thompson, 88, who became one of the most prominent family-law attorneys in Virginia and who was instrumental in modernizing the commonwealth's divorce statutes, died Monday at George Washington University Hospital in Washington.

She had suffered a stroke, said Laura Dove, a lawyer at Ms. Thompson's Arlington County-based firm.

After graduating from George Washington University's law school in 1948, Ms. Thompson became one of the first female lawyers in Arlington, Va. She made a short-lived bid for the General Assembly in 1957 as a pro-segregationist candidate but in later decades reversed herself as "very open-minded" on equal rights. Her continuing ties to state political leaders brought considerable influence as her stature rose in legal circles.

Ms. Thompson, once dubbed the "queen of divorce court" by an admiring peer, was initially a trial lawyer who litigated civil and criminal cases. She developed a speciality in domestic-relations law in the 1960s as demand grew amid the increasing social tolerance for divorce.

Divorce law proved immensely profitable to Ms. Thompson, who was not shy about her expensive tastes in clothes, wine, art, and jewelry. As she became known as one of the most effective (and priciest) divorce lawyers in the area, she was critical about ephemeral matrimony ("Marriages today are not for keeps - everything's throwaway.") and the desire among divorcing parties for revenge instead of legal resolution.

Ms. Thompson was the first woman to lead the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association and the Arlington County Bar Association, and she helped open such networking groups to women.

Until 1982, Virginia was among the few remaining "title" states, in which a spouse whose name was on the title to a property retained ownership after a divorce. A court did not have the legal authority to perform the equitable (not necessarily equal) distribution of that property. Ms. Thompson helped shape the state's adoption of equitable-distribution statutes in 1982.

Ms. Thompson had no immediate survivors. - Washington Post

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