Legal Commons^™

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Consuelo Vanderbilt And Transatlantic Marriages In The Gilded Age, Katie M. Cassady

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Between 1865 and the onset of World War I, wealthy American women increasingly married titled European men. These marriages played a critical role for both parties: the newly moneyed elite asserted its claim to social status, and depleted European nobility regained the funds so essential to their longevity. By 1915, 454 American heiresses had married into the European aristocracy. In one famous example, Consuelo Vanderbilt was forcibly wed to the ninth Duke of Marlborough. As the Vanderbilt family labored to assimilate themselves into old-money New York society, the opportunity to tie their family name to English nobility could catapult the …

Oral Interview: Contextualizing The Women's Rights Movement In Tunisia Through Family History, Walid Zarrad

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

In their path towards emancipation and equal rights, Tunisian women have gone through a number of phases that seem to be directly linked to legal changes and cultural factors. In fact, the Code of Personal Status (CPS) of 1956 seems to be a milestone in the women’s movement, and its following amendments continued on this path. However, it is a lot more complex than that. A piece of legislation officially passing is not a simple determinant of the state of Women’s Rights in a country.

Through Dorra Mahfoudh Draoui’s “Report on Gender and Marriage in Tunisian Society” and my interview …

Reconstructing The Black Family: How The Freedmen’S Bureau Sought To Shape Black Family Structures After Emancipation, Megan R. Busby

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Divine Suppressors: Bigamy In The Eighteenth-Century Criminal Justice System, Luke Hs Horton

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

The criminal justice system in eighteenth-century England was an integral part of European society. The legal system had always been associated with several facets of everyday life and touched upon the lives of those in every class of European society. One of England’s oldest and most significant courthouses was the Old Bailey, which held thousands of trials and sessions over the two hundred and forty years it was active. Out of the wide variety of cases to choose from, ten sexual offences revolving around bigamy were selected to present how the criminal justice system leaked into different areas of life. …

Divorce As Liberation: Marital Expectations Among The Working-Class In The 1950s, Kristin M. Catrone

Theses and Dissertations

Divorce was a remedy employed by working-class Americans in the 1950s when their marital expectations went unmet. Spouses left emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive marriages. Expectations for marriage also centered around assumptions based on gender. Working-class women showed how divorce could be used as a tool of liberation and empowerment.

One Man And One Wife? The Legal History Of Marriage In The Culture And Courts Of America, Tyler Speer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For my honors thesis I will be writing on the legality and shifting attitudes of marriage throughout United States history. This thesis will explore three Supreme Court cases: Davis v. Beason (1890), Loving v. Virginia (1967), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which explores polygamous, interracial, and homosexual marriages respectively. The full name of my thesis is "One Man and One Wife? The Legal History of Marriage in the Culture and Courts of America." The thesis will be upwards of fourty pages in length and will examine marriage from both historical and legal lenses and will be conducted through the History …

Equity In American And Jewish Law, Itzchak E. Kornfeld , Ph.D.

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cuckoldry And The “Gone For A Soldier” Narrative: Infidelity And Performance Among Eighteenth-Century English Plebeians, Elias Hubbard

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project addresses existing historical arguments about the role of performance in eighteenth-century English plebeian infidelity cases, identifying some of the cultural scripts available to married men and women from popular texts in order to better understand cases of infidelity in contemporary plebeian marriages. The thesis seeks to clarify the effect of infidelity on a plebeian individual’s social standing and relationships, and to draw conclusions about the nature of plebeian infidelity, marriage, and gender in England through the long eighteenth century.

While examining contemporary public texts of cuckoldry, I address how homosocial behavior appears in narratives of cuckoldry, how the …

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. …