Marry Me, Bill: Should Cohabitation Be the (Legal) Default Option?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are cohabitation and marriage similar enough to warrant similar legal treatment? Earlier public reports on cohabitation have focused on the question of whether cohabitation before marriage increases or decreases the divorce rate. But increasingly cohabitation is being proposed not as a testing ground for marriage, but as a functional substitute for it. The trend in family law and scholarship in Europe and Canada is to treat married and cohabiting couples similarly, or even identically. In this country, the American Law Institute [ALl] recently proposed that, at least when it comes to the law of dissolution, couples who have been living together for a substantial period of time should be treated the same as married couples. The ALI recommendations carry particularly intellectual weight, given they are the product often years of study by one of the most influential and mainstream voices on legal reform. This essay evaluates (a) the weight of social science evidence on the extent to which, and the condition under which, cohabitation is the functional equivalent of marriage (b) the mechanisms, from a law and economics perspective, through which formal recognition of a relationship as a marriage may boost well-being, and (c) the likely consequences of blurring the legal distinction between formal and informal unions, as the ALI proposes. Generally, we see too many problems with cohabitation defined as an alternative to marriage to believe that law and social policy should actively support this emerging family form. Looking at the weight of social science evidence on marriage and cohabitation, this paper suggests what we believe is a middle ground: law and public policy should distinguish between cohabitation as a prelude to marriage (or a courtship strategy) and cohabitation as an alternative to marriage. The evidence, we suggest, points to many fewer problems with the former than the latter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".