Un June 23, 1997, the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys convened to consider the conduct of Jerry L. Berg, a Wichita, Kan­sas, divorce lawyer. In separate complaints, six of Berg’s female cli­ents accused him of improper sexual behavior. After considering the evidence, the panel recommended disbarment. Although no specific prohibition exists in Kansas banning […]

All these recent efforts reorient discussions of the intersection be­tween intimacy and monetary payments in fundamental ways. They reject separate spheres-hostile worlds dichotomies as well as noth — ing-but reductionisms. What’s more, in one way or the other, each critic discussed recognizes the presence of differentiated social ties and corresponding variations in payment systems. They […]

A different radical challenge to hostile worlds and separate spheres legal principles comes from a cluster of feminist legal scholars who claim that separation of spheres fundamentally undermines wom­en’s interests.[17] Turning traditional women’s work exclusively into a matter of sentiment dangerously obscures its economic value. American courts, these scholars argue, have long collaborated in such […]

Attempts to reconcile economic transactions and intimacy have gen­erally tried to strike some balance between the two, but have not surpassed either hostile worlds or nothing-but reductionisms. In the preceding chapter, we have already seen Richard Posner’s attempt to get rid of a hostile worlds view by replacing it with a nothing — but economic […]

The following list outlines, in summary form, the changes that the doctrine of consortium has undergone: • Criminal conversation: Only men can collect until the late nineteenth century, when women acquire rights to sue, but the doctrine itself simultaneously dwindles in importance at the same time. • Alienation of affections: Only men can collect until […]

Coverture’s decline, moreover, is linked to a second significant transformation in husbands’ and wives’ legal relationship to each other—focusing on what the law defines as marital consortium: the investment that husbands and wives acquire in each other’s com­pany. Consortium becomes a crucial doctrine in tort cases when third-party actions damage that investment, either intentionally or […]

The law of coverture was inherited from English common law and regulated legal transactions between husbands and wives. Most significantly, it established a sharp distinction between a legally in­dependent unmarried woman and a married wife. Single women obviously did not enjoy full legal citizenship, for example, with re­spect to voting or jury duty. Nevertheless, they […]

As a consequence of negotiation, the law changes incrementally through an incessant process of contestation. Lawyers specialize in introducing new distinctions, new analogies, new arguments, and new doctrines. What is more, courts respond, however slowly, to changes in social life at large. Legislatures also enact new statutes in response to gradual social changes and to […]

Let us look more closely at legal practices that regulate intersections of intimacy and economic transactions. Legal practice displays a de­gree of internal coherence and autonomy, but it does not evolve and exist in an entirely separate world. As a first approximation, it helps to distinguish three interacting social phenomena: relational pack­ages, social categories, and […]

More generally, the two cases illustrate important points concerning the law’s intervention in intersections of intimacy and economic life. Intimate relations only become legal cases in rare circumstances; most of the time intimately connected people work out their differ­ences without litigation. However, when such private disputes turn into legal suits, courts regularly adopt hostile worlds […]