Al Saleh v Nakeeb: Schrödinger's marriage
Image: Public Domain, via Piqsels When the first paragraph of a judgment mentions Schrödinger's famous cat-in-the-box thought experiment then I am compelled to read on. In full, the first paragraph of Mr Justice Poole's judgment in Al Saleh v Nakeeb reads as follows: "The Appellant husband and Respondent wife married in Syria in 2000. The husband maintains that they divorced in 2010 but accepts that a Syrian court revoked that divorce in January 2017. Prior to the revocation, the wife petitioned for divorce in this jurisdiction in 2016. The husband contends in his grounds of appeal that although "the 2010 divorce was revoked with retrospective effect (as a matter of Syrian law)", the 2010 divorce "remained valid and effective". The physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously proposed a thought experiment in which paradoxically his cat could both exist and not exist at the same time. The paradox raised by the husband's appeal is that the parties were sim
