Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 22 of 22
Full-Text Articles in Law
Marriage Is On The Decline And Cohabitation Is On The Rise: At What Point, If Ever, Should Unmarried Partners Acquire Marital Rights?, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Marriage Is On The Decline And Cohabitation Is On The Rise: At What Point, If Ever, Should Unmarried Partners Acquire Marital Rights?, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Articles
This article draws attention to the cultural shift in the formation of families that has been and is taking place in this country: Marriage is on the decline and cohabitation is on the rise. Part II documents this cultural shift by using recent government data to trace the decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 9.71%, but the husband-and-wife households only grew by 3.7%, while the unmarried-couple households grew by 41.4%. Because of the Supreme Court's decidion in Obergefell v. Hodges, marriage is now universally available to same-sex couples. Part …
With Marriage On The Decline And Cohabitation On The Rise, What About Marital Rights For Unmarried Partners?, Lawrence W. Waggoner
With Marriage On The Decline And Cohabitation On The Rise, What About Marital Rights For Unmarried Partners?, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Articles
This article draws attention to a cultural shift in the formation of families that has been and is taking place in this country and in the developed world. Part I uses recent government data to trace the decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 9.71 %, but the husband and wife households only grew by 3.7%, while the unmarried couple households grew by 41.4%. A counter-intuitive finding is that the early 21st century data show little correlation between the marriage rate and economic conditions. Because of the …
For The Best Of Friends And For Lovers Of All Sorts, A Status Other Than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners And The Legacy Of Marvin V. Marvin)" , David L. Chambers
For The Best Of Friends And For Lovers Of All Sorts, A Status Other Than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners And The Legacy Of Marvin V. Marvin)" , David L. Chambers
Articles
American governments have recently begun to experiment with new familial statuses for gay male and lesbian couples, who have demanded the right to marry but have been appeased with more modest forms of recognition.4 What I propose here is quite different. It is a status for people who have close bonds but do not want to be married to each other. I call this status "designated friends." Once registered, "designated friends" would obtain a limited number of privileges and undertake a limited number of responsibilities relating to the care for the other when ill or incapacitated or upon death, but …
The Baker [Baker V. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999)] Case, Civil Unions, And The Recognition Of Our Common Humanity: An Introduction And A Speculation, David L. Chambers
The Baker [Baker V. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999)] Case, Civil Unions, And The Recognition Of Our Common Humanity: An Introduction And A Speculation, David L. Chambers
Articles
Every. Vermonter seems to know about two recent decisions of the Vermont Supreme Court. In the first, the court struck down the system of local financing of public schools. Like similar decisions in many other states, the school financing case led to a struggle in the legislature and difficulties for legislators at election time. In the second and even more controversial decision, the court reached an outcome that no other state supreme court had ever reached: it held unconstitutional the state's marriage law on the ground that it inappropriately denied the legal benefits of marriage to same-sex couples. This decision, …
Civilizing The Natives: Marriage In Post-Apartheid South Africa, David L. Chambers
Civilizing The Natives: Marriage In Post-Apartheid South Africa, David L. Chambers
Articles
South Africa is a land of many cultures. For several hundred years, British and Afrikaaner whites controlled the country, systematically manipulating black people to the whites' advantage. For the most part, however, whites tolerated the continuation within black communities of traditional marriage practices that white Christians considered uncivilized. In 1994, South Africa changed governments. A black majority Parliament came to power, adopting a consitution dedicated to equality and human dignity. Four years later, Parliament adopted a new marriage law that, though permitting some of the external trappings of the traditional marriage system to continue, eliminated by law much of the …
Family Law And Gay And Lesbian Family Issues In The Twentieth Century, David L. Chambers, Nancy D. Polikoff
Family Law And Gay And Lesbian Family Issues In The Twentieth Century, David L. Chambers, Nancy D. Polikoff
Articles
Over these thirty years, lesbians and gay men have increasingly challenged conventional definitions of marriage and the family. In this brief article, we tell the story of gay people and family law in the United States across this period. We divide our discussion into two sections: issues regarding the recognition of the same-sex couple relationship and issues regarding gay men and lesbians as parents. These issues overlap, of course, but since family law discussions commonly treat adult-adult issues of all sorts separately from parent-child issues, we believe it convenient and helpful to do so as well.
Lesbian Divorce: A Commentary On The Legal Issues, David L. Chambers
Lesbian Divorce: A Commentary On The Legal Issues, David L. Chambers
Articles
Lesbian couples who break up will find themselves in an awkward position under the law for two separable but related reasons. The first is that, because they were unmarried, they are subjected by the law to much the same uneven and ambivalent treatment to which unmarried heterosexual couples are subjected. The second, of course, is that they are gay or lesbian and thus regarded with special disfavor even in some states that have become more tolerant of unmarried heterosexual relationships. As a law teacher who is gay and who writes about family law issues relating to gay men and lesbians, …
Marriage Today: Legal Consequences For Same Sex And Opposite Sex Couples, David L. Chambers
Marriage Today: Legal Consequences For Same Sex And Opposite Sex Couples, David L. Chambers
Articles
Laws that treat married persons in a different manner than they treat single persons permeate nearly every field of social regulation in this country -- taxation, otrts, evidence, social welfare, inheritance, adoption, and on and on.
Polygamy And Same-Sex Marriage, David L. Chambers
Polygamy And Same-Sex Marriage, David L. Chambers
Articles
In the American federal system, state governments bear the responsibility for enacting the laws that define the persons who are permitted to marry. The federal government, throughout our history, has accepted these definitions and built upon them, fixing legal consequences for those who validly marry under state law. Only twice in American history has Congress intervened to reject the determinations that states might make about who can marry. The first occasion was in the late nineteenth century when Congress enacted a series of statutes aimed at the Mormon Church, prohibiting polygamy in the Western territories and punishing the Church and …
What If? The Legal Consequences Of Marriage And The Legal Needs Of Lesbian And Gay Male Couples, David L. Chambers
What If? The Legal Consequences Of Marriage And The Legal Needs Of Lesbian And Gay Male Couples, David L. Chambers
Articles
Laws that treat married persons in a different manner than they treat single persons permeate nearly every field of social regulation in this country - taxation, torts, evidence, social welfare, inheritance, adoption, and on and on. In this article I inquire into the patterns these laws form and the central benefits and obligations that marriage entails, a task few scholars have undertaken in recent years. I have done so because same-sex couples, a large group not previously eligible to marry under the laws of any American jurisdiction, may be on the brink of securing the opportunity to do so in …
Marriage, Morals, And The Law: No-Fault Divorce And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider
Marriage, Morals, And The Law: No-Fault Divorce And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
In this Essay, I want to reflect on no fault-divorce and the social attitudes that underlie it. In particular, I want to consider that reform in light of an article I wrote some years ago entitled Moral Discourse and the Transformation of American Family Law. There I argued that in recent years the language of American family law has changed notably: today family law issues are decreasingly discussed in the language of morality. In other words, legal institutions have decreasingly talked about those issues in moral terms. Rather, they have tended to avoid handling some moral issues altogether-often by …
State Interest Analysis And The Channeling Function, Carl E. Scheider
State Interest Analysis And The Channeling Function, Carl E. Scheider
Book Chapters
In this article, I wish to criticize the narrowness of the Supreme Court's conception of the interests states may advance to justify statutes challenged on constitutional privacy grounds. I also wish to identify and describe one of the several state interests that not infrequently undergirds such legislation but that the Court has failed to understand.
State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
I want to develop some themes I advanced in my article entitled State-Interest Analysis in Fourteenth Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay on the Constitutionalization of Social issues. In that article I noted that while courts and commentators have lavished effort on the fundamental-rights side of privacy law, they have scanted the state-interest side, thereby producing crucial weaknesses in that law. I felt that state~interest discussions in privacy cases often seemed to me unsatisfying. This is an attempt to see why. A major difficulty is that states tend to advance and courts tend to accept quite narrow specifications of a statute's …
The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
On an occasion such as this, we are called to step back from our daily work to seek what Justice Holmes called a "liberal view" of our subject. Today, I propose to do so by exploring a function of family law that I believe is basic, that underlies much of family law, that resonates with the deepest purposes of culture but that is rarely addressed expressly-namely, what I call the "channelling function." As I will soon explain at length, in the channelling function the law recruits, builds, shapes, sustains; and promotes social institutions. My exploration of this topic will have …
Tales Of Two Cities: Aids And The Legal Recognition Of Domestic Partnerships In San Francisco And New York, David L. Chambers
Tales Of Two Cities: Aids And The Legal Recognition Of Domestic Partnerships In San Francisco And New York, David L. Chambers
Articles
Here are two stories. They are of the quite different ways that domestic partnerships of lesbian and gay couples have come to be recognized, for some purposes, in San Francisco and New York City. I tell the stories for their own sake, but with a particular focus on the role that AIDS played in the political process in each city.
Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Articles
The subject of "marital property rights" is very timely because those rights are in a state of transition. The term "marital property rights" covers a vast multitude of rights or interests conferred by law on persons who occupy the status of spouse. This lecture is divided into four discrete, yet related segments. The first segment addresses how the law allocates original ownership between spouses in a marriage. The second segment turns to the intestate share of the surviving spouse. This is not a topic that high-powered estate planners get involved in very much because intestate estates are usually fairly small. …
Ex Proprio Vigore, James J. White
Ex Proprio Vigore, James J. White
Articles
The National Conference of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) is a legislature in every way but one. It drafts uniform acts, debates them, passes them, and promulgates them, but that passage and promulgation do not make these uniform acts law over any citizen of any state. These acts become the law of the various states only ex proprio vigore - only if their own vitality influences the legislators of the various states to pass them.
Rethinking Alimony: Marital Decisions And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider
Rethinking Alimony: Marital Decisions And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
The riddle of alimony is why one former spouse should have to support the other when no-fault divorce seems to establish the principle that marriage need not be for life and when governmental regulation of intimate relationships is conventionally condemned. Perhaps the most intelligent and probing recent attempt to solve that riddle is Ira Ellman's The Theory of Alimony. In this article, I have two purposes. The first is to ask some questions about Professor Ellman's admirable inquiry into this intricate and intractable problem. These questions are not intended to disprove "the theory." Professor Ellman has, at the least, identified …
Stepparents, Biologic Parents, And The Law's Perception Of 'Family' After Divorce, David L. Chambers
Stepparents, Biologic Parents, And The Law's Perception Of 'Family' After Divorce, David L. Chambers
Book Chapters
The drama of divorce always contains at least two characters, a woman and a man, and often a third, a child born to the woman and the man. If you have read the other chapters of this book, you have rarely encountered any of the other persons who may be affected by a divorce, such as the children of either person from a prior marriage, or later spouses or partners of either party, or later born children of either party-all the persons who are or become stepchildren or stepparents. You have not encountered them because, in this country, with minor …
Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller
Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller
Articles
There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the laws suggest it was possible for more than one household to be resident in the same uncompartmentalised farmhouse; and where headship might often be shared. Definitions, for example, based on co residence or on commensalism do not jibe all that well with the pastoral transhumance practised by the Icelanders. Sheep were tended and …
Foreign Marriages And The Conflict Of Laws, Herbert F. Goodrich
Foreign Marriages And The Conflict Of Laws, Herbert F. Goodrich
Articles
With the purely local phases of the law governing the relation of husband and wife, Conflict of Laws has no concern. Nor do we deal with Public International Law problems, such as the question of expatriation by marriage. We are concerned with two questions: first, what law governs the creation of the marriage relation; and second, the recognition and protection to be given the relation and incidents arising therefrom, under the law of states other than that in which the relationship was created.
Divorce Laws And The Increase Of Divorce, Evans Holbrook
Divorce Laws And The Increase Of Divorce, Evans Holbrook
Articles
Along with the condemnation of the divorce evil has gone a very general disposition to condemn our divorce laws as being responsible for the evil. The committee on resolutions of the Congress on Uniform Divorce Laws in its report to the Congress at its adjourned session in Philadelphia, November 13, 1906, speaks of the "many evils engendered by the lax and unphilosophic system prevailing in many of the states."3 On this phase of the question also our late president gave his views in his special message to Congress on January 30, 1905, in the following words: "There is a wide-spread …