Law Commons^™

Proving The Validity Of Marriage, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

The importance of proving the validity of a marriage is not limited to the practice of family and has far-reaching social, legal, and economic implications in other areas of the law as well. For example, wrongful death statutes in Virginia limit recovery of a statutory beneficiary to the legal spouse rather than the de facto spouse. Other areas of the law including intestate succession and probate law, real property law, Social Security benefits, worker's compensation statutes, insurance benefits, and spousal support rights are likewise directly affected by the validity of a marriage.

Thus, a Virginia practitioner, during the course of …

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 …

Alimony And Efficiency: The Gendered Costs And Benefits Of Economic Justification For Alimony, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Marriage And Opportunism, Margaret F. Brinig, Steven M. Crafton

Journal Articles

Spouse abuse is no longer a secret. It has become a thorn in America's conscience. Abuse even warranted a lengthy Supreme Court discussion in an opinion on abortion. It is certainly worth thinking about whether anything systemic caused the apparent outbreak of violence in the home. If there is a legal "fix" that would remove incentives to abuse, and therefore reduce the incidence of abuse at the margin, we should know about it.

It is the thesis of this article that increased abuse and other undesirable behavior is a natural consequence of the fact that in some states the marriage …

Housework, Wages, And The Division Of Housework Time For Employed Spouses, Joni Hersch, Leslie S. Stratton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

While the popular press may have declared housework passe with the advent of the two-income household (see "Housework is Obsolescent" by Barbara Ehrenreich [1993] for one such example), the facts indicate that housework continues to consume a substantial amount of time, particularly for women. While estimates vary widely depending on the sample examined and the methods used to generate the information, representative values of housework time range around 6-14 hours per week for men and 20-30 hours for women. Since wages are likely to be influenced both directly and indirectly by the time and effort devoted to other activities, and …

Tribute To William F. Fratcher: Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

"Marital property rights," a term that covers a vast multitude of rights or interests conferred by law on persons who occupy the status of spouse, are in a state of transition. To discuss the themes and trends that are emerging, this Article 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 much concerns high-powered estate planners because intestate estates are usually fairly small. But to the surviving spouse, …