Legal Question in Family Law in California

You should file a complaint for divorce. If she does not respond to your complaint and answer within 30 days, it will be an uncontested divorce and will go through without any problems. However, you will still have to serve her with the complaint and summons. She should be served in person and not by you. If you know where she lives, I would suggest you have someone serve her personally with the complaint and summons.

For further information, I would suggest going to your local courthouse to the self-help center. If you do not intend to hire an attorney, they will point you in the right direction.

Ms. Gerritsen gave you an answer that is technically correct, but rather muddled, over simplified, and disregards the key issue, which is that your wife is not in the U.S. I agree with her that your situation indicates that California would have jurisdiction over the divorce. The problem is obtaining jurisdiction over your wife. I'm fairly sure that by obtaining a "green card" and coming here, your wife has established sufficient contacts with California for personal jurisdiction as well as subject matter jurisdiction, but it would be best to have that checked with a little research. Assuming you have jurisdiction, you still need to get it served. Again Ms. Gerritsen makes it sound like that is as easy as having someone just hand the summons and divorce petition to your wife. Unfortunately it is a lot more complicated than that. Hopefully the country your wife is in is a signatory to the Hague Service Convention of 1965 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Service_Convention). If your wife is willing to cooperate, you can avoid the whole Hague Convention process by simply sending her a copy and her filing an answer with the California court. If a responding party files an answer, the issue of service is moot. It is only if they do not file an answer that you need valid service in order to take a default (which is the key issue Ms. Gerritsen glossed over). If she will not cooperate, however, you will need to go through the whole Hague Convention process to get her served before you will be able to take her default and get a default divorce.