ABSTRACT
Nonmarital cohabitation has become a mainstream family structure in the United States. Yet, despite the increasing prevalence of nonmarital cohabitants, American family property law generally fails to support nonmarital couples. This inequality under the law disproportionately disadvantages persons of color, those with relatively less education, and couples with relatively fewer economic resources. This Article considers the post-Obergefell need for law reform to better support nonmarital families, examines the principles that should ground nonmarital property rights reform, and proposes a novel approach to nonmarital property rights that integrates the law of dissolution with the law of succession, unifies the law governing nonmarital property rights with the law of marital property rights, and better serves not only the relatively privileged but also the relatively disadvantaged.
This Article proposes an integrated ‘accrual adaptor’ to structure nonmarital property rights at dissolution and at death. The adaptor would be applied to a jurisdiction’s existing marital property law to translate a marital property right into a nonmarital property right. Thus, the proposal would not require an adopting jurisdiction to create any novel property law structures for the nonmarital context and would be fully compatible with the substantive principles and process norms that ground the adopting jurisdiction’s existing marital property law doctrines …
Spitko, E Gary, Integrated Nonmarital Property Rights (2021), SMU Law Review, volume 75, forthcoming 2022.
First posted 2021-10-22 13:00:03
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