The Marriage Buyout The Troubled Trajectory of U.S. Alimony Law

<p>From divorce court to popular culture, alimony<br/> is a dirty word. Unpopular and rarely ordered, the awards are frequently<br/> inconsistent and unpredictable. The institution itself is often viewed as an<br/> historical relic that harkens back to a gendered past in which women lacked the<br/> economic independence to free themselves from economic support by their spouses.<br/> In short, critics of alimony claim it has no place in contemporary visions of<br/> marriage as a partnership of equals. But as Cynthia Lee Starnes argues in The<br/> Marriage Buyout, alimony is often the only practical tool for ensuring that divorce does not treat<br/> today's primary caregivers as if they were suckers. Her solution is to<br/> radically reconceptualize alimony as a marriage buyout.<br/> Starnes's buyouts draw on a partnership model of marriage that reinforces<br/> communal norms of marriage, providing a gender-neutral alternative to alimony<br/> that assumes equality in spousal contribution, responsibility, and right. Her<br/> quantification formulae support new default rules that make buyouts more<br/> certain and predictable than their current alimony counterparts. Looking beyond<br/> alimony, Starnes outlines a new vision of marriages with children, describing a<br/> co-parenting partnership between committed couples, and the conceptual basis<br/> for income sharing between divorced parents of minor children. Ultimately,<br/> under a partnership model, the focus of alimony is on gain rather than loss and<br/> equality rather than power: a spouse with disparately low earnings isn't a<br/> sucker or a victim dependent on a fixed alimony payment, but rather an equal<br/> stakeholder in marriage who is entitled at divorce to share any gains the<br/> marriage produced.</p>