The fracture toughness of liquid-crystalline epoxy systems, which had a nematic polydomain structure (domain size about 40 μ m), with an increasing loading rate was evaluated. In this system, the fracture toughness dramatically decreased from 1.96 to 0.22 MN/m(3/2) with an increasing loading rate (0.1-5 mm/min). The network orientation near the fracture surface of different loading rate systems was investigated with polarized optical microscopy and polarized infrared spectroscopy. As a result, a large oriented region of mesogenic groups was observed near the fracture surface in the relatively low loading rate (0.1 and 0.5 mm/min) systems, but such a phenomenon was not observed in the high loading rate (2 and 5 mm/min) systems. These results showed that the high fracture toughness of the system at the low loading rate was due to the magnitude and region of the reorientation of the mesogenic groups in the fracture process and that high toughness could not be achieved at a high loading rate because the loading rate was too fast to allow orientation of the networks containing the mesogenic groups. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.