Leckey on Cohabitation

Robert Leckey (McGill University - Faculty of Law) has posted Self and Other: Cohabitation and Comparative Method on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

The paper intervenes in policy debates on unmarried cohabitation and comparative law debates on methodology. It adopts a culturally alert, discursive methodology of comparison to study regulation of unmarried cohabitation under the common law and civil law in Canada. It identifies not different legislative solutions to a common problem, but distinct discourses of family law regulation. Yet the approaches may be less radically opposed than is often thought. The study underscores the tendency of discursive comparison to highlight dominant voices at the expense of minority ones. Minority views may be wrongly characterized as foreign to a tradition. Moreover, discursive comparison may take a synchronic view of present legal debates. By contrast, a richer diachronic approach will also attend to views within a legal traditions past.