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Guardians: A Research Note, Chris Guthrie, Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman
Guardians: A Research Note, Chris Guthrie, Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Guardianship goes back quite far in legal history; it has been a feature of American law since the colonial period. Something like guardianship is a necessity in a system that recognizes private ownership of property, while dividing the world into those who are, and those who are not, sui juris-that is, fully capable of acting on their own. The boundaries between these two domains can be quite indistinct. Defining who is insane or incompetent can be especially problematic because these categories are socially and culturally variable. Most people committed in 1900, for example, would hardly be considered insane today; they …
The Road Less Taken: Annulment At The Turn Of The Century, Chris Guthrie, Joanna Grossman
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 …