The Marriage Buyout : : The Troubled Trajectory of U.S. Alimony Law / / Cynthia Lee Starnes.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Starnes, Cynthia Lee,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Families, Law, and Society ; 4
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

From divorce court to popular culture, alimonyis a dirty word. Unpopular and rarely ordered, the awards are frequentlyinconsistent and unpredictable. The institution itself is often viewed as anhistorical relic that harkens back to a gendered past in which women lacked theeconomic independence to free themselves from economic support by their spouses.In short, critics of alimony claim it has no place in contemporary visions ofmarriage as a partnership of equals. But as Cynthia Lee Starnes argues in TheMarriage Buyout, alimony is often the only practical tool for ensuring that divorce does not treattoday’s primary caregivers as if they were suckers. Her solution is toradically reconceptualize alimony as a marriage buyout.Starnes’s buyouts draw on a partnership model of marriage that reinforcescommunal norms of marriage, providing a gender-neutral alternative to alimonythat assumes equality in spousal contribution, responsibility, and right. Herquantification formulae support new default rules that make buyouts morecertain and predictable than their current alimony counterparts. Looking beyondalimony, Starnes outlines a new vision of marriages with children, describing aco-parenting partnership between committed couples, and the conceptual basisfor income sharing between divorced parents of minor children. Ultimately,under a partnership model, the focus of alimony is on gain rather than loss andequality rather than power: a spouse with disparately low earnings isn’t asucker or a victim dependent on a fixed alimony payment, but rather an equalstakeholder in marriage who is entitled at divorce to share any gains themarriage produced.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Alimony reflections -- 1. Who cares about alimony? -- 2. Alimony’s heritage: the helpless, the blameless, and the clean-break losers -- 3. Alimony and mother myths -- Part II. Alimony mechanics -- 4. The contemporary state of alimony -- 5. Alimony in context: a comparative perspective -- Part III. Alimony theory -- 6. Reasons matter alimony, intuition, and the remarriage-termination rule -- 7. The search for a contemporary rationale -- Part IV. Alimony reform -- 8. A marital partnership model: alimony as buyout -- 9. Beyond alimony: lovers, parents, and partners -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index -- About the author