Law Of Domestic Relations Research Articles

Commitment and Dependency in Marriage

The persistence of marriage, like its dissolution, is the result of many factors. Research on the variables that contribute to persistence in marriage focuses on commitment, a term that is frequently used to describe individuals and relationships, yet one that is rarely defined and even less often researched. This article takes a small step toward filling that gap. The research reported here is an attempt to study commitment in marriage, especially as it is structured by various forms of dependency. Commitment is presumed to be influenced by dependency (among other things). The married woman without gainful employment or marketable skills is believed to be more constrained in her options than an employed wife. Indeed, much of the increase in divorce since the late 1960s may be the consequence of women's entry into the paid labor force (see Cherlin, 1992, and Greenstein, 1990, for reviews of these arguments). Employed women have alternatives to abusive or loveless marriages that unemployed women do not. Yet not all unloved or abused wives divorce their husbands. Research has shown that repeatedly battered wives, for example, will often remain with their husbands because of dependencies that constrain them--economic dependency in particular (Steinmetz, 1987). This research does not attempt to explain why abused wives remain with their abusive husbands. Nor does it attempt to explain divorce. Rather, the comments made about these topics are offered to illustrate conventional uses of the concept of commitment and to make the point that commitment and persistence are separable phenomena. Even were it possible to develop a full theory of why some marriages do not last, we would still lack a theory of commitment because the behavior of persistence is different from the concept of commitment, despite their obvious relationship. COMMITMENT Commitment is typically invoked to explain why people engage in a consistent line of activity--a point made by Becker over 30 years ago (Becker, 1960). With respect to marriage, for example, we might explain the persistence of unions by reference to the commitment of spouses to their marriage or to one another. As noted above, however, the behavior (staying married) is not the same thing as commitment. Becker suggested that two elements characterize commitment as a source of consistency. First, an individual does something that creates an interest in his or her following a consistent line of action. That is, some interest that was initially unrelated to a particular line of action is now linked to it because of something the person has done. Second, the individual becomes aware that his or her continued action has implications for the originally extraneous interest(s). When a person marries, for example, this action creates, for him or her, a stake in the continuation of the union. If it fails, then there will be consequences that would not have occurred without the marriage. Thus, the marriage created an interest that had not previously existed. For the married person, this may be the love, security, or tangible property elements that are part of intimate relationships. Many such interests are created by the marriage and are threatened by its termination. Domestic relations law recognizes the stake that partners have in their marriage in the legal principle of consortium. Spouses rely on one another for such things as domestic labor, sexual intimacy, and fidelity. Over time, many spouses will invest massive amounts of time and energy in their relationships, while foregoing alternative relationships, in an effort to keep these spousal benefits flowing. Indeed, for many, if not most, spouses, protecting the marital relationship is as important as protecting any other major personal interest, be it health, sanity, or integrity....Historically, the law has recognized and protected this unique interest through its concept of consortium. Such elements as domestic duties, interaction, affectional intimacy, love, and sexual intercourse are among the factors typically recognized under the law, and when their infringement is deemed an offense according to statute or court decision, monetary damages can be exacted. …

Love It or Leave It: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Exclusivity of Remedies in Partnership and Marriage

The traditional rule in partnership law is that a claim for final accounting is a partner's exclusive remedy. Under this rule, withdrawal from a partnership must precede or accompany legal actions against one's partners. A partner must love it or leave it, with judicial attention available only after leaving the relationship. Rather plainly, this rule can be unfair and inefficient. At the same time, there is something attractive about the idea of encouraging private compromise by limiting the availability of courts to parties that are unable to continue their relationships. Part II of this article introduces this tension by discussing the evolution of the rules of partnership law away from the love-it-or-leave-it, or exclusivity, tradition and by comparing traditional partnership law first to domestic relations law, where the love-it-or-leave-it character of remedies is even more striking, and then to corporate law, where the structure of remedies is almost reversed. Parts III and IV connect this exploration of remedies to a familiar framework in the law-and-economics literature that compares property rules and liability rules. The connection reveals new ways of thinking about the remedies in partnership law and casts light on the occasional attractiveness of love-it-orleave-it rules. Part V compares the selection of remedies in business and in marriage, with some reference to other relationships as well. Part VI offers some concluding comments about love-it-or-leave-it strategies and the evolution of our legal system.

Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History

In the first section of this essay I discuss alternative ways of interpreting an eighteenth-century anecdote about employment relations. This serves to introduce a series of arguments that advocate altering our conception of labor history (with special reference to American labor history) in ways that center it on the study of household relations. Asserting that law is the primary site upon which authoritative social relations are constituted, I also argue that legal history—in this case the history of domestic relations law—is of fundamental importance to the labor history the essay recommends.

Patriarchy in America Is Different: Grossberg's Governing the Hearth

conception of the state's interposing itself the family by means of direct address to the individual keeps him from exploring the possibility that inter-group conflicts (on ethnic, racial, gender, class grounds) may have been at the very heart of change family law policy. His own find6. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 214-216; cf. Linda Gordon, Single Mothers and Child Neglect, 1880-1920, 37 American Quarterly 173-192 (Summer 1985). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.254 on Mon, 05 Sep 2016 04:48:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 816 AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 1987:809 ings, such as that anti-miscegenation laws refuted the republican promotion of matrimony, or that persistence of involuntary indenturing of children (especially black children) could only tortuously be justified in the best interests of the child, might have suggested an interpretation of family law's development terms of the contest for cultural control being waged an increasingly heterogeneous and stratified American society. Where this bold and venturesome book fails to persuade, it nonetheless will spark strong and, one hopes, constructive responses from legal and social historians alike. Grossberg's work will be of interest to other scholars exploring how far back, what humble beginnings, and how deeply committed to the ideology of gender difference and gender hierarchy the welfare state began its rise. With his significant research Grossberg has established that judges were policy-makers who bowed not entirely (although they did bow) to either of their two acknowledged masters, the common law and social mores. He has made an emphatic case for embedding legal history its social matrix. Governing the Hearth renders insight and engenders spirit into both the history of domestic relations law and family history, beckoning others to follow erasing the boundaries between the two. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.254 on Mon, 05 Sep 2016 04:48:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Crossing Boundaries: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Relations Law and the Merger of Family and Legal History

This essay argues for the need to study the legal history of the American family. It does so by combining a critique of secondary literature in family and legal history with examples from nineteenth-century domestic relations law. These examples, drawn from family law doctrines on seduction under the cover of a marriage promise, runaway marriages, and bastardy, are used to indicate the benefits of adding a sociocultural dimension to legal history and legal and institutional dimensions to family history. Three main themes in the history of nineteenth-century domestic relations law are developed to make these points: the law's particular fabric of issues, its distribution of authorship, and its chronological development, These themes suggest why a full understanding of the legal history of the American family requires crossing the boundaries between legal and family history.

Crossing Boundaries: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Relations Law and the Merger of Family and Legal History

Crossing Boundaries: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Relations Law and the Merger of Family and Legal History

Historical Research in Home Economics: A Model for Implementation

In this article, the concept of historical research is considered, first as a generic method of research and second as a tool specifically pertinent to home eco nomics. Initially, historical research is defined from the perspectives of various historians. The steps in the historical method are delineated and explained and those steps are in turn included in a conceptual model. Actual application of historical research to a problem in home economics is exemplified by a step‐by‐ step account of a study of the historical relationship between home economics and family law. The two objectives of that research were: (1) to delineate and analyze the concerns common to the fields of family law, as exemplified by the New York Domestic Relations Law, and to home economics; and (2) to isolate the resultant influences of each field on the other. In addition to serving as an example of historical research, the results of the research are used to show the potential influence of the information gained from historical research on the field of home economics.

Hozumi Nobushige and the Old Civil Code of 1890

The Japanese Old Civil Code compiled mainly by the French legal advisor G. E. Boissonade, and published in 1890, was to take effect in 1893, but the Postponement Campaign against the Code arose in the meantime. Consequently the Diet decided to postpone the enforcement of the Code and a new Civil Code drafted by the Japanese jurists went into operation in 1898, which is still effective except for the law of domestic relations and succession.HOZUMI Nobushige (1855-1926) was one of the leading champions of the postponement party and became de facto chairman of the three draftsmen of the new Code later on. In this paper the author intends to clarify the contents of his criticism of the Old Civil Code and to criticize the prevailing view which regards the legal theory of Hozumi as westernized and progressive, introducing his lecture Principles of Civil delivered at the Law School of the Imperial University from 1890 to 1893.The main points of his lecture are as follows.1. The arrangements of the Old Code is based on the French Civil Code with a few adjustsments. Hozumi, however, considered the German style (Pandekten System) technically better and suitable to the Japanese conventional succession system, unlike the French Roman style (Institution System).2. He approves the Family System provided in the Old Civil Code for the most part. For, it pays much cosideration to the Japanese customs, although its original draft was progressive under the influence of Boissonade.3. It is claimed that the property provision of the Old Code is, like the French Civil Code, lacking the concept of the totality (Totalitat) of the property right which the German Code emphasized. Furthermore, according to his judgement, the Old Code makes the restriction of the property impossible by adopting the Natural Law Theory.4. While Boissonade plans to protect the leaseholders in the Old Code, Hozumi states that it is against the customs and will destroy the ethical characters of the Japanese lease relationship.As has been noted before, the influence of the German Law is evident in Hozumi's criticism of the Old Civil Code, yet, the author advocates that Hozumi pays much consideration to the Japanese customs and conventions, in this sense, he shares much sentiment with the other members of the postponement party.

Forensic Psychiatric Examinations: Competency

The many definitions of competency in civil, criminal, and domestic relations law are discussed with emphasis on the various legal criteria for competency and the different classes of psychiatric information required to apply the criteria to a given case. Within the context of a general discussion of forensic examinations, techniques for gathering the right kind of information are systematically related to the exigencies of evaluating past, present, or future mental states by selectively altering the focus of mental status evaluations and history-taking. In addition, special investigative techniques such as hypnosis, Amytal sodium interview, stress interview, psychological testing, and others are discussed.

Invisible Women: The Legal Fiction of Marital Unity in Nineteenth-Century America

In Thaler v. Thaler, a 1977 New York divorce case awarding alimony to husband, judge had occasion to summarize nineteenth-century shift in legal status of married women. At common law, he asserted, the husband and wife were orne and husband was one .... But with advent of married woman's property acts ... any previous justification for this one-way support duty faded.' In same year, however, an unemployed Brooklyn construction worker aired his reservations about his wife's employment by evoking old common law image of marriage. When get married, he said, you figure it's gonna be like one. Only it's always husband's one.2 The first of these comments suggests focus of this essay: challenges to common law doctrine of marital unity during a pivotal era of American law, roughly 1820-1860.3 The second comment reflects its emphasis: uncanny persistence of that doctrine far beyond its Christian and common law origins. The judge in Thaler v. Thaler based his decision, in part, on an 1848 statute extending to married women right to own their own property. He interpreted statute as a significant legal alteration in patriarchal family and implied that like many other statutes passed in common law jurisdictions during this period, it marked beginning of legal equality between wives and husbands.4 By contrast, this essay contends that married women's property acts failed to make such a significant alteration. Admittedly, if one defines patriarchy in husband-wife relationship as reduction of wife to status of property owned and controlled by husband, one could argue that it never existed in its purest form in Anglo-American legal tradition.5 Yet, basic elements of that patriarchal construct underpinned all of Anglo-American domestic relations law, and they continued to exist long after enactment of married women's property acts of mid-nineteenth century.

Family and Domestic Relations Law. Divorce. Fault Is Relevant in Determination of Alimony in Divorce Action Brought under No-Fault Prolonged Separation Statute. Flanagan v. Flanagan, 311 A. 2d 407 (Md. 1973)

Family and Domestic Relations Law. Divorce. Fault Is Relevant in Determination of Alimony in Divorce Action Brought under No-Fault Prolonged Separation Statute. Flanagan v. Flanagan, 311 A. 2d 407 (Md. 1973)

State Domestic Relations Law and Federal Tax Policy

State Domestic Relations Law and Federal Tax Policy

Eversley's Law of Domestic Relations: Husband and Wife, Parent and Child, Guardian and Ward, Infants, Master and Servant

Eversley's Law of Domestic Relations: Husband and Wife, Parent and Child, Guardian and Ward, Infants, Master and Servant

Cases on the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Cases on the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Eversley's Law of Domestic Relations: Husband and Wife, Parent and Child, Guardian and Ward, Infants, Master and Servant

Eversley's Law of Domestic Relations: Husband and Wife, Parent and Child, Guardian and Ward, Infants, Master and Servant

Cases on the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Cases on the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Handbook of the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Handbook of the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Handbook of the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Handbook of the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Handbook of the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

Handbook of the Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

The Law of Persons and Domestic Relations

The Law of Persons and Domestic Relations