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Throughout the early modern period, French law forbade unsanctioned marriages between minors, a crime classified as "seduction." Men who wed without the consent of their bride's parents earned the designation "seducers" and faced the potential of capital punishment. By the mid-eighteenth century, notorious seduction cases assumed outsize significance because of radical changes in legal culture. From the 1760s until the eve of the Revolution, defense lawyers wielded the legal brief as a powerful instrument of public opinion, criticizing parental control over marriage and championing free choice in its place. These men transformed seduction cases into referendums on paternal power--and, by extension, the power of the monarchy itself. While historians have long examined politically charged critiques of paternal power during this period, this article explores these critiques' unique implications for unwed women. It illustrates how celebrated lawyers mobilized language of Enlightenment to carve out discursive space in which young women exercised autonomy vis-à-vis their parents. Nevertheless, it also argues that these same legal discourses constrained female happiness to the realm of marriage to sooth anxieties about the threat that disobedient daughters posed to family, social, and gender order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially from romantic disappointment, the more they sought to prove it in court. Women dressed the lesions of their hearts in the disinterested language of medicine and borrowed psychological categories of trauma from victims of war and railway injuries. Heartbreak was thus legitimized as a species of pain by a convergence of law, medicine and women’s audacity to take their feelings seriously. The court’s response to these new bodily articulations of suffering provides a counter-history to the usual tale of law’s preference for the tangible over the intangible. Somatic injury was relegated to special damages, determined by the evidence of doctors and with less lucrative compensation, while emotional injury occupied the dominant, more profitable category of general damages. The history of heartbreak thus demonstrates the historical contingency of legal hostility to emotional injury. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As evidenced by laws addressing abandonment of the home and children, family preservation was paramount for early twentieth-century Latin American nation builders. The judicial record of abandonment cases from Guatemala demonstrates how men attempted to enforce their authority in the home and then enlisted state officials to uphold it when their wives or daughters defied them. Yet, abandonment litigation often liberated women. By condoning female flight as a response to domestic abuse, judges emancipated women with the very laws intended to corral them. The same gendered institutions that buttressed patriarchies also provided women with the tools to challenge men's perceived right to intimidate and beat women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on religion, pluralism, and marriage in countries such as Canada, the U.S., and Great Britain as of October 2011. It states that in 2010, Oklahoma residents voted in favor of amending the Oklahoma State Constitution by adopting the "Save Our State Amendment" which prohibits the state courts from considering any form of international law, including Sharia law.

In the late nineteenth century, a new category of law—‘the family’—spread across and beyond Europe via new legal codes and scholarship. These made explicit the relationship between marriage, the family and the state and emphasised the interiority of the family as a ‘protective’ enclave. Yet the incoherence of this position as it played out in legislative debate is often overlooked. This article examines parliamentary debates over mixed marriages in Hungary, as an interesting window on the state's inability to clarify political priorities vis-à-vis the family. Catholic factions and anti-clerical opposition alike were troubled by the idea of state intervention in any form, in a century characterised by a general tendency towards state legislation as a primary source of law. This ambiguity revealed itself as a series of oscillations that were located squarely within the deep ambiguities of modern European legal culture concerning the family as a site of cultural freedom and as a (necessary) target of state intervention. These oscillations undermined what might be described as a straightforward patriarchal approach to gender order in family law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the status of the bodies of wives in the 16th century both in terms of moralistic theology, and of legalities pertaining to medicine, Among other topics addressed are the relationship between sexuality and marriage in the context of sexual identity, the Christian doctrine that a husband and wife are two people united in one flesh, and how attitudes toward women and marriage influenced medical practice and legal realities. Each of these topics is approached in the context of feminism.

Le texte pose le probleme general de la conception de «l'identite des germains» que se fait une societe donnee, conception qui conditionne la notion d'inceste et l'ensemble des regles qui president aux echanges matrimoniaux. En occident, le christianisme impose, a la fin de l'Antiquite et pendant le Haut Moyen Age, a travers la notion d'una caro, une complete identite des germains: freres et sœurs sont des etres semblables et l'affinite qu'ils nouent par leur mariage rejaillie sur tous les germains d'allies, voire sur les allies de ces allies (affinite de 2e et 3e genre). En 1215, le Concile du Latran limite l'affinite au 1er genre (les germains de l'allie du seul Ego). Freres et sœurs restent identiques mais chacun acquiert une «autonomie» matrimoniale par rapport a l'autre: les echanges de sœurs, les mariages «doubles» (deux freres avec deux sœurs) redeviennent possibles. Les XVIIIe et XIXe siecles sapent completement cette conception chretienne des germains: freres et sœurs redeviennent des etres differents. Les interdits d'alliance fondamentaux tombent: le levirat et le sororat sont legalises, les empechements dans la consanguinite sont limites a des degres tres proches (cousins germains ou oncle/niece). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]