Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

Against Marriage appeals to liberal feminist principles to expose the injustices of state-recognized marriage, and then offers an elegant and promising alternative. Chambers proposes that the state should devise default rules to regulate intimate partnerships, which would take into account the practices that constitute them, rather than regulate these partnerships through some system of contracts or status. Chambers points out that the state already does this for unmarried domestic partners and coparents, and it should simply apply the same rules to partners who happen to have solemnized their relationship via a religious-based marriage or a public commitment ceremony. For egalitarians, there really is no justification for the state to regulate family units differently when they contain a married couple, such as by granting tax relief, immigration preference, or next-of-kin rights only to the latter. Instead, Chambers suggests, there could be substantive default rules that...