Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

PDF

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Series

Divorce

Discipline
Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

When Equitable Is Not Equal: Experimental Evidence On The Division Of Marital Assets In Divorce, Jennifer B. Shinall, Joni Hersch Dec 2019

When Equitable Is Not Equal: Experimental Evidence On The Division Of Marital Assets In Divorce, Jennifer B. Shinall, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Upon divorce, marital assets in most U.S. states are divided equitably, often with the underlying legal purpose of equalizing outcomes. To examine whether decisionmakers value economic considerations, such as opportunity cost, specialization, and bargaining power, we conducted a vignette study in which we asked subjects to divide marital assets equitably between an employed husband and a wife without labor market income in a wealthy household. Subjects award less than 50 percent of assets to the wife, regardless of her education or the level of marital assets. Men award lower shares but, unlike women, award a larger share to a more …


Settling In The Shadow Of Sex: Gender Bias In Marital Asset Division, Jennifer Bennett Shinall Jan 2019

Settling In The Shadow Of Sex: Gender Bias In Marital Asset Division, Jennifer Bennett Shinall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Divorce has a long history of economically disempowering women. From the time of coverture to the era of modern divorce reform, women have been persistently disadvantaged by divorce relative to men. Family law scholars have long attributed this disadvantage to the continued prevalence of traditional gender roles and the failure of current marital asset division laws to account adequately for this prevalence. In spite of the progress made by the women's movement over the past half-century, married, heterosexual women endure as the primary caretaker in the majority of households, and married, heterosexual men endure as the primary breadwinners. Undoubtedly, women …


The Road Less Taken: Annulment At The Turn Of The Century, Chris Guthrie, Joanna Grossman Jan 1996

The Road Less Taken: Annulment At The Turn Of The Century, Chris Guthrie, Joanna Grossman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is hardly surprising that certain legal institutions--adoption, wills, and guardianship--have lasted through the centuries. Each meets a different, seemingly timeless need: providing parenting for orphans or abandoned children, distributing property at death, and dealing with legal incapacity, respectively. Similarly, divorce, though it appeared somewhat later, took hold and persisted for an obvious reason-the increasing demand for a legally sanctioned way to terminate broken marriages. The endurance of annulment, however, particularly in the face of increasingly liberalized divorce laws, defies easy explanation. The existence of annulment prior to the mid-nineteenth century is easily explained. Until 1857, England was a "divorceless …