Once the divorces were final Mr. Williams and Ms. Hendrix were married and then moved back to North Carolina.

[1] Mr. Williams was given a decree of divorce on August 26, 1940 by the state of Nevada on the grounds of extreme cruelty, the court finding that 'the plaintiff has been and now is a bona fide and continuous resident of the County of Clark, State of Nevada, and had been such resident for more than six weeks immediately preceding the commencement of this action in the manner prescribed by law'.

Soon after their marriage they returned to North Carolina where they lived together as man and wife until a lawsuit was filed against them.

[6][7] The inkling from the majority opinion that the Nevada divorces were untrustworthy suggests that the second theory on which the state tried the case may have been an alternative ground for the decision below.

It was adequate to sustain the judgment under the rule of Bell v. Bell—a case in which the Court held that a decree of divorce was not entitled to full faith and credit when it had been granted on constructive service by the courts of Nevada, a state in which neither spouse was domiciled.

[10] Since the Williams et al. v. State of North Carolina case from 1942, American law in this area has changed in two distinct but related ways.

Second, in a variety of contexts the Supreme Court has recognized not only a constitutional right to marry but a broad freedom of intimate association.” It is unlikely that a state would go to such great lengths to preserve a marriage against the will of one spouse and that the trial would be given the same weight today that it was given in the 1940s.