Hanoch Dagan (Tel Aviv University - Buchmann Faculty of Law) has posted Spousal Contracts and Choice Theory (European Contract Law and Theory, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Contract is one of the key tools liberal law employs in the service of its core mission of enhancing people’s autonomy, and choice theory conceptualizes this task as contract’s telos. It thus prescribes three principles – proactive facilitation, regard for the future self, and relational justice – for guiding the legal constitution of contract law in all spheres of human interaction. Spousal contracts are no exception. Thus, the law governing spousal agreements both allows people to adjust the default rules governing their marital estates and provides people off-the-shelf options for structuring their interpersonal interaction as a spouse. In turn, the law of marital contract ensures that free exit from marriage is, as it should be, immutable. Finally, relational justice guides, albeit still imperfectly, both law’s normative defaults for marital contracts and the rules that govern premarital, marital, and cohabitation agreements.
Highly recommended.
