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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough Jan 2016

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …


Governed By Marriage Law, Deirdre Mcgowan Jan 2016

Governed By Marriage Law, Deirdre Mcgowan

Books/Book Chapters

Marriage law links the private and the political, connecting the aspirations of individuals to the regulatory ambitions of the state. Marriage has significant social and cultural importance, but the assumptions of stability and care it entails are also useful to government. As a result, marriage law has, both historically and in the present, been offered as the solution to a range of social problems. Using Ireland as a case study example, this essay focuses on the problems which marriage law reform has attempted to address and the political frameworks within which reform took place. It suggests that marriage law is …