Thanks MP Goddess for sharing your personal knowledge and experience of these matters. Hard to imagine that anyone would have more than you, given the professional and personal ways you come at this, that is both from the perspective of an employee who works with the MP+ program and has has seen this play out with others, and from that of an MP+ account holder who has herself contested in a "non-amiable" way the issue with an ex-spouse.
I agree that a judge should not be able to make UA transfer miles from MP Goddess's MP+ account that of her ex-, effectively modifying its program and the terms of its contract with its member, MP Goddess, for the benefit of the ex-. And I agree that a judge might seek to compel MP Goddess to allow the ex- use of those miles, especially since it seems that MP Goddess did not challenge the divorce decree's recognition of those miles as part of the marital estate and award of rights in them to the ex-. Do you agree with me that rather than wrestling with this, what should have been done was a $ value should have been given to the miles and those $s should have been what was divided between them avoiding the "specific performance" issue?
Who gets the miles ought not be a big dilemma, at least not nearly as big a dilemma as who gets the kids, or even who gets the beloved family poodle. While the value of miles can be argued (and that is an interesting one for FTers), they are not priceless, invaluable, inestimable, etc. Anyone who thinks they are, ought to rethink their attachment to their MP+ accounts. (Of course, the value of denying an ex- what they want is very understandable, and I do understand and empathize. Courts, though, stay clear of such by whatever means they can, most especially by "monetizing" all that can be expressed in $s.)
I wonder if MP Goddess and ex- ever tried to negotiate a value for those 120K miles. They might have employed the cake-cutting approach - one person cuts the cake, and the other person choses which of the two resulting pieces they will take - with the ex- stating how much the miles should be worth, then MP Goddess saying whether she would keep the miles and pay him what he claimed they were worth, or giving him the miles (or use of the miles) in return for what he offered to pay for them. I suspect, though, she likes better the way it has gone, at least until now, with ex- feeling he was screwed.