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Chapter 8 takes up the problem of implementing the marriage law of ideal theory in a non-ideal world. It addresses concerns that minimal marriage would worsen the lot of the vulnerable, especially women, by eliminating anti-poverty marriage promotion, mandatory alimony and property division protecting the economically dependent, and permitting gender-structured polygyny. Liberals could consistently support transitional provisions for benefits and property division, but liberalism can, and should, also address such problems through legal vehicles other than marriage, especially through education and default rules of financial fairness. Political liberalism holds a number of insufficiently recognized tools for feminists, including rectification, neutrality, and the status it assigns to goods of care and self-respect.

This book presents stories of antebellum families in crisis, showing the pervasive nature of domestic violence, white women leaving their abusive husbands and filing for divorce or separation, and slaves caught in between marital clashes. It also examines the processes of revising divorce and alimony statutes, and the enactment of laws to protect married women's property before the Civil War. As time passed, lawyers and judges evolved, including state laws with regard to divorce, separation, and alimony suits. White women fared better than white men in their pleas for divorce and separation, and were likely to receive favorable results. After the Civil War, most of the suits were filed by men; slavery never again entered the equation, and women did not have to fight to retain control of their slave property.

This chapter examines the current state of alimony law. It argues that alimony guidelines have morphed in two significant ways. First, guidelines are taking on more importance, shifting from local to state-wide application, and from optional guidance to statutory presumptions. Second, guidelines have assumed a new goal: in addition to increasing the certainty and predictability of alimony awards, guidelines are increasingly advanced as a means to limit alimony eligibility, duration, and value. Much of the energy of the contemporary guideline movement comes from grassroots alimony reform groups, state-by-state organizations composed largely of alimony payors (and sometimes their new spouses) who aim to end “alimony abuse.” These reformers are inspiring a new wave of disdain for alimony and new statutory restrictions on its availability.

This concluding chapter argues that alimony is often the only available tool for ensuring that divorce does not impose all the long-term costs of marital roles on caregivers while freeing the other spouse to enjoy all the long-term benefits. Yet in its current incarnation, alimony is not up to the task before it. The law of alimony inspires orders that are unpredictable, inconsistent, short-lived, and uncommon. Alimony's problems are exacerbated by the absence of any contemporary rationale to justify its existence in an age of no-fault divorce and supposed gender equality. Drawing on a loose analogy to partnership, the book has proposed that alimony be reconceptualized as a marriage buyout. Buyouts support new default rules that reinforce egalitarian, gender-neutral, communal visions of marriage, encourage expectations consistent with that vision, and in all but very low-income cases, protect primary caregivers who rely on marriage promises.

This chapter examines the current state of alimony law. It argues that alimony guidelines have morphed in two significant ways. First, guidelines are taking on more importance, shifting from local to state-wide application, and from optional guidance to statutory presumptions. Second, guidelines have assumed a new goal: in addition to increasing the certainty and predictability of alimony awards, guidelines are increasingly advanced as a means to limit alimony eligibility, duration, and value. Much of the energy of the contemporary guideline movement comes from grassroots alimony reform groups, state-by-state organizations composed largely of alimony payors (and sometimes their new spouses) who aim to end “alimony abuse.” These reformers are inspiring a new wave of disdain for alimony and new statutory restrictions on its availability.

This concluding chapter argues that alimony is often the only available tool for ensuring that divorce does not impose all the long-term costs of marital roles on caregivers while freeing the other spouse to enjoy all the long-term benefits. Yet in its current incarnation, alimony is not up to the task before it. The law of alimony inspires orders that are unpredictable, inconsistent, short-lived, and uncommon. Alimony's problems are exacerbated by the absence of any contemporary rationale to justify its existence in an age of no-fault divorce and supposed gender equality. Drawing on a loose analogy to partnership, the book has proposed that alimony be reconceptualized as a marriage buyout. Buyouts support new default rules that reinforce egalitarian, gender-neutral, communal visions of marriage, encourage expectations consistent with that vision, and in all but very low-income cases, protect primary caregivers who rely on marriage promises.

This chapter considers the near-universal rule that alimony terminates upon a recipient's remarriage. The vast majority of states, either through case or statutory law, provide that a recipient's remarriage automatically terminates alimony, or at least creates a prima facie case for termination. However, the rule has no conceptual basis in contemporary understandings of alimony. As the American Law Institute (ALI) acknowledges, the underlying rationale for the remarriage-termination rule is “remarkably unclear.” The chapter begins by discussing the remarriage-termination rule. It then identifies the purpose of alimony, an essential first step in assessing the legitimacy of the remarriage-termination rule. The final section considers judicial rationales for the remarriage-termination rule, which fall into three rough categories: (1) unseemliness, (2) election, and (3) untidiness.

This chapter turns to theories of alimony offered by contemporary scholars in search of a rationale for the remarriage-termination rule. Contemporary scholars have long struggled to explain alimony in an age of easy divorce and equality rhetoric, but there is still no consensus on the answer to the questions: Why should anyone be forced to share income with a former spouse? If divorce severs the tie between spouses, if each spouse is entitled to a clean break and a fresh start as no-fault laws teach, what is the rationale for alimony? Most theories of alimony focus primarily on one of three interests: (1) a claimant's contributions to the other spouse (contribution theory); (2) a claimant's expected gain (gain theory); and (3) a claimant's loss (loss theory).

This chapter delves into a specific and particularly important species of a liberal commons: marital property. It endorses a vision of marriage as an egalitarian liberal community, and takes this as the regulative principle of marital property law. This vision endorses commitment to a marital community where spouses share without reference to individual desert, together with a concern for nonsubordination and for the protection of individual autonomy, primarily through free exit. It argues that, contrary to the common assumption, not only are these goals not incompatible but they can also be accommodated to a remarkable degree. It then traces the implications of this vision of marriage for marital property law, relying on it to defend the equal division rule for existing marital property, which is broadly defined to include increases and decreases in the spouses' earning capacity during the pendency of their marriage. The chapter also discusses alimony, generally endorsing the practice of rehabilitative alimony and property governance during marriage, arguing in favor of management rules currently applied in many community property states.

Chapter One examines concerns about alimony in the late 1920s, a moral panic at which gold diggers took center stage. Historians have described the first two decades of the twentieth century as the “first sexual revolution,” a time period which drastically altered attitudes about love, marriage, and divorce. The acceleration of romantic love as the primary justification for marriage coupled with new social and economic roles for women, prompted a rise in the divorce rate. As the divorce rate increased, and as the economic basis for family life changed, many Americans expressed widespread concern about men falling victim to alimony-seeking gold diggers. Coinciding with these changes, the parameters of who was considered “white” were in flux, and cultural negotiations of whiteness occurred in gendered and sexualized spaces, like advertising and popular entertainment. Specific white women, like former Ziegfeld star Peggy Hopkins Joyce, came to embody the gold digger and the problem of extravagant alimony awards. Well-publicized stories of greedy gold diggers focused on the high alimony awards sought by Joyce and others but, in reality, alimony payments had not substantially increased. Rather, the social panic about alimony reflected Progressive-Era angst about gender, class, and race.

Courts have in fact encountered cases involving LATs, primarily in the context of contests about whether alimony to a previous spouse should be terminated based on cohabitation. In these cases, judges have been devising a series of tests for determining whether a couple is in fact cohabiting or living apart together. This chapter will describe those cases, in the course of which the lives of LAT couples are revealed in more detail. In the absence of any consistent legal treatment, obvious injustices result, such as the denial of palimony suits and terminating alimony set after a long marriage based on a woman’s subsequent LAT relationship, although it involves no financial interdependence at all.

This chapter examines the developments in Hal Ashby's career and personal life during the year 1968. Ashby filed for divorce and give Shirley Citron $100 alimony per week. His collaboration with Norman Jewison, In the Heat of the Night was nominated for several Academy Awards. The film won several major awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, and the Best Film Editing for Ashby.

This chapter considers the near-universal rule that alimony terminates upon a recipient's remarriage. The vast majority of states, either through case or statutory law, provide that a recipient's remarriage automatically terminates alimony, or at least creates a prima facie case for termination. However, the rule has no conceptual basis in contemporary understandings of alimony. As the American Law Institute (ALI) acknowledges, the underlying rationale for the remarriage-termination rule is “remarkably unclear.” The chapter begins by discussing the remarriage-termination rule. It then identifies the purpose of alimony, an essential first step in assessing the legitimacy of the remarriage-termination rule. The final section considers judicial rationales for the remarriage-termination rule, which fall into three rough categories: (1) unseemliness, (2) election, and (3) untidiness.

This chapter turns to theories of alimony offered by contemporary scholars in search of a rationale for the remarriage-termination rule. Contemporary scholars have long struggled to explain alimony in an age of easy divorce and equality rhetoric, but there is still no consensus on the answer to the questions: Why should anyone be forced to share income with a former spouse? If divorce severs the tie between spouses, if each spouse is entitled to a clean break and a fresh start as no-fault laws teach, what is the rationale for alimony? Most theories of alimony focus primarily on one of three interests: (1) a claimant's contributions to the other spouse (contribution theory); (2) a claimant's expected gain (gain theory); and (3) a claimant's loss (loss theory).

This chapter discusses the laws governing India's two largest religious minorities, Muslims and Christians. Policy makers retained distinct minority laws to accommodate minorities, but their limited engagement with minority initiatives and traditions and their stereotypes about Muslims being backward led them not to change minority laws after independence, even though support for personal-law reform was comparable among Muslims and Hindus. The growth of minority reformist mobilization and the engagement of more Hindu activists and policymakers with such initiatives enabled changes in minority law starting in the 1970s. Notably, alimony was required and unilateral male repudiation restricted among Muslims, and divorce rights increased for Christians and Parsis. Hindu-centered policy visions still limited the accommodation of demands to reform minority law (such as granting adoption rights to Christians), dissuaded legislation to increase Muslim women's rights (for example, to agricultural land), and kept Muslim law most distinctive.

Not all marriages last and unlike other personal relationships, the dissolution of a marriage requires legal involvement to end the relationship. A divorce not only severs a marriage, but it also introduces legal involvement. That legal involvement is in the form of state laws that define how divorces are granted, whether the couple needs to have a formal separation before a divorce can be granted, how property should be divided upon dissolution, and whether formalized spousal financial support should commence. Although the law is involved in each of these issues, there are now more opportunities for the use of alternative dispute resolution options rather than traditional court settings that attempt to give more of the decision making back to the couple.

This chapter examines the legal repercussions of domestic violence for family law. It first considers domestic violence as a ground for divorce and where fault is a factor that courts can take into account in determining the division of property or the setting of alimony. It then discusses the implications of domestic violence for child custody, premarital agreements, marital agreements, and separation agreements. It also takes note of the fact that many statutes and international law conventions create exceptions to the normal rules where domestic violence or child abuse is present.