“If I get married, I want to be very married.”
-Audrey Hepburn.
Ms. Hepburn’s sentiment is an understandable one. However, since marriage is a creature of state law, whether a person is married (very or not) is not always an easy question to answer. The status of what seems to be a very married couple can be upset by claims of bigamy, polygamy, lack of capacity, undue influence, and fraud. Whether the claims will be sustained to upset an apparently-valid marriage often will depend upon the state laws that may apply, as well as on the views of the courts applying those laws.
The purpose of this article is not to conduct a 50-state survey but to highlight how the different approaches of the different states can affect the outcomes of marriage contests and the rights of a purported spouse to inheritance.
We begin with two cases involving James Brown, the godfather of soul—a dissolution case and a probate case— because they present the question: Was the final probate result dictated by the statute, or did the court have its own clear views about the proper outcome?
Read more here.
-Audrey Hepburn.
Ms. Hepburn’s sentiment is an understandable one. However, since marriage is a creature of state law, whether a person is married (very or not) is not always an easy question to answer. The status of what seems to be a very married couple can be upset by claims of bigamy, polygamy, lack of capacity, undue influence, and fraud. Whether the claims will be sustained to upset an apparently-valid marriage often will depend upon the state laws that may apply, as well as on the views of the courts applying those laws.
The purpose of this article is not to conduct a 50-state survey but to highlight how the different approaches of the different states can affect the outcomes of marriage contests and the rights of a purported spouse to inheritance.
We begin with two cases involving James Brown, the godfather of soul—a dissolution case and a probate case— because they present the question: Was the final probate result dictated by the statute, or did the court have its own clear views about the proper outcome?
Read more here.