Family Law Commons^™

Promulgating The Marriage Contract, Lynn A. Baker

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

I begin Part I of this Article by positing several logically necessary, but insufficient, conditions that precede a state's decision to promulgate a law more aggressively than usual. I then show that each of these conditions was met with regard to the economic terms of the marriage contract in virtually all states by 1975. In Part II, I explore what Louisiana's unusually aggressive promulgation of certain terms of the marriage contract reveals about the legal system's conception of the marital relationship as of 1975. In Part III, I discuss what is added to that conception of the modern marital relationship …

Stepparents, Biologic Parents, And The Law's Perception Of 'Family' After Divorce, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

The drama of divorce always contains at least two characters, a woman and a man, and often a third, a child born to the woman and the man. If you have read the other chapters of this book, you have rarely encountered any of the other persons who may be affected by a divorce, such as the children of either person from a prior marriage, or later spouses or partners of either party, or later born children of either party-all the persons who are or become stepchildren or stepparents. You have not encountered them because, in this country, with minor …

The Politics Of God And The Woman's Vote: Religion In The American Suffrage Movement, 1848-1895, Elizabeth B. Clark

Publications

This thesis examines the role of religion— both liberal and evangelical Protestantism— in the development of a feminist political theory in America during the nineteenth century and how that feminist theory in turn helped to transform American liberalism. Chapter 1 looks for the genesis of women's rights language, not in the republican rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, but in the teachings of liberal Protestantism and its links with laissez-faire economic theory. The antebellum understanding of rights is shown to have encompassed social and civil rights alike, and to have arisen from a vision of the mutual benefits that derived from …

Individual Entitlement To The Financial Benefits Of A Professional Degree: An Empirical Study Of The Attitudes And Expectations Of Married Professional Students And Their Spouses, Rebecca Redosh Eisner, Ruth Zimmerman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Part I of this Note describes the case law that delineated the factors examined in the study. Those factors are the financial support provided by the supporting spouse, the extent of personal sacrifice made by the supporting spouse, the length of the marriage and corresponding accumulated assets of the marriage at the time of the divorce, and the relative earning capacities of the two parties after the divorce. Part II discusses the design of the study, and specifically how we manipulated these factors in hypothetical vignettes to measure reactions to the factors. Part III presents the results and our conclusions …

Legislatures And Legal Change: The Reform Of Divorce Law, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Silent Revolution: Routine Policy Making and the Transformation of Divorce Law in the United States by Herbert Jacob

Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller

Articles

There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the laws suggest it was possible for more than one household to be resident in the same uncompartmentalised farmhouse; and where headship might often be shared. Definitions, for example, based on co residence or on commensalism do not jibe all that well with the pastoral transhumance practised by the Icelanders. Sheep were tended and …

The Problem Of Selecting A Valuation Date For Property Subject To Equitable Distribution In New York

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Legal History Of The Family, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America by Michael Grossberg

The Law Of Alimony, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Heartbalm Statutes And Deceit Actions, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note considers whether actions in deceit based on fraudulent marriage promises should be deemed barred by the heartbalm statutes. It determines that they should not. Part I examines the policies and arguments against the common law breach of promise to marry action that are embodied in the heartbalm statutes and looks at the limits courts have placed on the reach of the statutes. Part II re-examines the deceit action in light of the purposes of the heartbalm acts and their intended scope, as well as in light of criticism of the action by the courts and commentators. In particular, …

Using Formulas To Separate Marital And Nonmarital Property: A Policy Oriented Approach To The Division Of Appreciated Property Upon Divorce, Louise Everett Graham

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Over the past ten years every writer venturing to discuss domestic relations must have been tempted to emphasize the importance of his or her work by opening with mention of the growing number of divorce cases confronting the court system. Beyond its numerical impact upon the judicial process, however, divorce litigation provides an important opportunity for the study of property rights and the institutions from which those fights are derived. Divorce cases increasingly involve difficult and complex questions concerning the marital property rights of the marriage partners. The importance of marital property cases is broader than the individual rules that …

The Putative Marriage Doctrine, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

The classic putative marriage doctrine is substantive, ameliorative or corrective; it is designed to allow all the civil effects -- rights, privileges, and benefits -- which obtain in a legal marriage to flow to parties to a null marriage who had a good faith belief that their "marriage" was legal and valid. Most jurisdictions in the United States have developed equitable analogues to the putative spouse doctrine that provide all or part of the relief afforded by the classic doctrine.

If a marriage is declared to be null or void, that declaration is retroactive to the day that the null …

The Unnecessary Doctrine Of Necessaries, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that neither the traditional nor the modem necessaries doctrines are justifiable in contemporary society. Part I investigates the practical effects of both the traditional and contemporary necessaries doctrines and demonstrates that neither is an effective mechanism for providing support to a needy spouse. While a more successful support remedy might be devised to replace modem and traditional versions of the necessaries rule, Part II shows that yet another reformulation would not be worthwhile because the theoretical underpinnings of the doctrine are faulty. There is no persuasive evidence to establish the existence of the narrow support problem the …

Incest Statutes And The Fundamental Right Of Marriage: Is Oedipus Free To Marry?, Carolyn S. Bratt

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court has found that the right to marry is a constitutionally protected right. That right is restricted, however, by state incest statutes which impede marriage between adults by making some choices of a marriage partner illegal. The constitutional validity of modern state incest statutes is difficult to analyze because of shifting definitions, reflexive fears, ambivalent attitudes, and underlying facile generalizations.

The mere word "incest" triggers strong feelings of revulsion in most people. Therefore, any a priori labeling of a marriage as incestuous tends to preclude objective thought about the permissibility of the particular form of the marriage …

The Marriage Contract, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of the The Marriage Contract by Lenore J. Weitzman

Illegitimacy: An Examination Of Bastardy, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy by Jenny Teichman

Kentucky Law Survey: Domestic Relations, Louise Everett Graham

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In the decade since Kentucky's adoption of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, the state's courts have faced the task of interpreting it in domestic relations litigation. This past year was no exception. A number of problems before Kentucky courts were recurrent issues. For example, the divisibility of educational degrees acquired by one spouse again required court assessment. Similarly, issues surrounding both maintenance and child support reappeared. These recurrent issues, along with new issues requiring court solution, heavily burdened trial and appellate courts. This Survey will discuss court resolutions of significant problems in the areas of marital property, maintenance and …

The Constitutional Status Of Marriage, Kinship, And Sexual Privacy -- Balancing The Individual And Social Interests, Bruce C. Hafen

Michigan Law Review

Today's lopsided competition between the individual and social interests has made the law a party to the contemporary haze that clouds our vision of what a family is or should be. In that sense, recent legal developments have contributed to the crisis Stanley Hauerwas has identified regarding American family life today - our inability to define "what kind of family should exist" and our inability to articulate ''why we should think of [the family] as our most basic moral institution."

In response to those two questions, this Article considers whether, as a constitutional matter, the courts should recognize claims by …

Marriage, Property &(And) The Affective Family, Lloyd Bonfield

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Guarding The Altar: Physiological Restrictions And The Rise Of State Intervention In Matrimony, Michael Grossberg

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Analytical And Comparative Variations On Selected Provisions Of Book One Of The Louisiana Civil Code With Special Consideration Of The Role Of Fault In The Determination Of Marital Disputes, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Faculty Scholarship

This article is intended to be a type of "structuralist" commentary upon selected provisions in Book I of the Louisiana Civil Code. Its sole purpose is to illustrate, both for pedagogical and doctrinal reasons, some of the analytical difficulties to which these code provisions might give rise when they are read in a close textual fashion. It should be emphasized that this study is a textual commentary and not a historical assessment of the sources or origins of the code texts – the latter analysis is outside the purview of the present endeavor.

Accordingly, this article consists of a critical …

The Legal Effect Of Marital Separation Agreements Upon Community Property Status: Is It Time To Amend The Constitutional Definition Of Wife's Separate Property., Teresa A. Hunter

St. Mary's Law Journal

The present constitutional definition of married women’s separate property serves to protect the wife’s property rights and to preserve the community property system in Texas. However, the policy reasons for the constitutional definition no longer apply, since there is no present danger of the legislature reducing the property rights of married women or abandoning the community property system. Further, the needs and customs of the people of Texas have changed since the adoption of the original Texas Constitution in 1845. Today, it is estimated that thirty percent of couples who marry in the United States eventually divorce and sixty percent …

What Causes Fundamental Legal Ideas? Marital Property In England And France In The Thirteenth Century, Charles Donahue Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Categorizing broadly, the marital property systems of the Western nations today are divided into two types: those in which husband and wife own all property separately except those items that they have expressly agreed to hold jointly (in a nontechnical sense) and those in which husband and wife own a substantial portion or even all of their property jointly unless they have expressly agreed to hold it separately. The system of separate property is the "common law" system, in force in most jurisdictions where the Anglo-American common law is in force. The system of joint property is the community property …

The Haitian Vacation: The Applicability Of Sham Doctrine To Year-End Divorces, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note examines the propriety of applying the sham doctrine to tax-motivated divorces. Section I outlines the evolution of the sham doctrine from its exposition in Gregory v. Helvering through its expression in two different tests for commercial transactions. Section II then studies the relationship between state divorce law and the marital status provisions of the Internal Revenue Code to demonstrate the clear congressional preference for incorporating state law by reference rather than creating an independent federal law of marriage. It also examines the history of the 1969 Tax Reform Act in a vain effort to discern a congressional desire …

Prohibiting Nonaccess Testimony By Spouses: Does Lord Mansfield's Rule Protect Illegitimates?, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Not surprisingly, there has been widespread disagreement concerning the validity of the policies advanced in support of Lord Mansfield's Rule and the efficacy of the rule to promote those policies. This Note assesses the validity of this rule of evidence in order to determine whether it is the most appropriate method of safeguarding the interests affected by the litigation of legitimacy. First, the historical development and justifications for Lord Mansfield's Rule are identified, and, in section II, the extent of the current acceptance of the rule in the United States is delineated. Section III analyzes traditional arguments advanced in support …

Comparative Reflections Of The "New Matrimonial Jurisprudence" Of The Roman Catholic Church, Charles Donahue Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A recent review of some developments in the law of the Roman Catholic Church concerning the annulment of marriages suggested to me that these developments might be of interest to an audience wider than that composed of those professionally or religiously concerned with the activities of the Church's tribunals. In particular, these developments may reveal something about the problem of incorporating the findings of modern psychology and psychiatry into a legal system, about the ways courts behave when confronted with social change, and perhaps even about the problematic relationship between law and morality. What follows, then, is a series of …

Marital Agreements In Contemplation Of Divorce, Barbara Klarman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Romantic notions that marriage is forever are beginning to give way to the more realistic assessments that marriages indeed may not last. The pressure has been mounting for ways to provide economic planning to parties in the relatively likely event that their marriages terminate in divorce. The purpose of this article is to focus on one method of obtaining such planning: the marital agreement setting forth the support and property distribution which the parties would follow in the event of divorce. This article will review the law regarding marital agreements in contemplation of divorce as it exists in the United …

Natural Law And The Marriage Of Christians, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Traditional Catholic marriage doctrine is under a good deal of pressure these days, and much of the pressure seems to come from canonists. It is not surprising that this should be the case. The ideal of Christian lovers giving themselves to one another irrevocably, and living out their commitment, with God's help, until death has lost none of its attractiveness. But as the canonists reflect on what they are doing, they become increasingly disturbed by their inability to offer a practical way out to people who have signally failed to implement the ideal in their lives.

Nevertheless, it seems to …

Federal Invome Tax Discrimination Between Married And Single Taxpayers, Michael W. Betz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This article explores the present tax rate structure and its implications, considers the historical events and policies which created four separate tax rates, analyzes the tax policies embodied by the different rate treatment of married and single taxpayers, and examines the constitutional problems involved in maintaining the present disparate tax treatment. An alternative tax rate treatment, which will avoid the discrimination inherent in the present system, is suggested.

Rheinstein: Marriage Stability, Divorce, And The Law, Robert F. Drinan, Michael Wheeler

Michigan Law Review

A Book Review of Marriage Stability, Divorce, and the Law by Max Rheinstein