Is Contemporary Western Family Law Historically Unique?

An in-depth analysis of this legislation is to be found in Philippe Sagnac, La législation civile de la Révolution française (1789-1804) (1898; reprint, Glashütten im Taunus: Auvermann, 1971).

For the Russian developments, see Maria V. Antokolskaia, "Development of Family Law in Eastern Europe: Common Origins, Common Driving Forces, Common Tendencies," Journal of Family History 28 (2003): 52-69 (this issue). A good overview of family law development in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is to be found in David Bradley, Family Law and Political Culture: Scandinavian Laws in Comparative Perspective (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1996).

See, among many sources, Lenard Berlanstein, "Illegitimacy, Concubinage and Proletarianization in a French Town, 1760-1914," Journal of Family History (1980): 360-74; Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe (London: Verso, 1992); Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1993). A comparative overview of illegitimacy figures is to be found in Peter Flora, Franz Kraus, and Winfried Pfenning, State, Economy and Society in Western Europe 1815-1975: A Data Handbook (Frankfurt-am-Main: Campus, 1987).

This was, for example, the case in nineteenth-century Tirol and Styria, where the nonpropertied did not get a marriage license, but the landowners, under pressure to be flexible as a result of the scarcity of servants, allowed their servants and maids to live in open concubinage. Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Siedler, Vom Patriarchat zur Partnerschaft: Zum Strukturwandel der Familie (Munich: Beck, 1977).

Seccombe, Weathering the Storm. An overview of the many alternatives to divorce practiced in times when divorce was inaccessible to the bulk of the population is to be found in Roderick Phillips , Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

For a thorough analysis of concepts of law, see François Ost and Michel Vandekerchove , Jalons pour une théorie critique du droit (Brussels: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1987).

As was already claimed by William J. Goode , World Revolution and Family Patterns (1963; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1970).

For a fuller overview of the historical developments in Europe over the past centuries, see my "Explaining Two Hundred Years of Family Law in Western Europe," in Het gezinsrecht in de sociale wetenschappen, ed. Harry Willekens (The Hague, the Netherlands: VUGA, 1997), 59-93. A systematic and sophisticated analysis of the radical changes of the past decades can be found in Marie-Thérèse Meulders-Klein, La personne, la famille, le droit. Trois décennies de mutations en occident (Brussels: Bruylant, 1999).

For a wide-ranging synthesis of the differential treatment of the legitimate and the illegitimate, see Harry Krause , "Creation of Relations of Kinship," in International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, vol. 4 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976).

The Prussian Allgemeine Landrecht of 1794 gave the illegitimate child an inferior inheritance right in the mother's family (a right to be abolished again during the nineteenth century), and the Italian Codice Civile of 1865 gave the illegitimate child inferior inheritance rights in both the mother's and the father's families. Ernst Holthöfer, "Fortschritte in der Erbrechtsgesetzgebung seit der französischen Revolution," in Zur Geschichte des Familien- und Erbrechts. Politische Implikationen und Perspektiven, ed. Heinz Mohnhaupt (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1987), 121-75.

See, e.g., art. 334 and 335 of the original code. Art. 340 forbade paternity suits.

Some examples: in Sweden, illegitimate children had no claims at all, not even to support, against their father until 1917 (although it should be pointed out that, as will be reported in the next section, the Swedish notion of legitimacy was somewhat broader than the legitimacy notion in most other countries, with the result that children who would have been illegitimate in other legal orders were deemed legitimate in Swedish law) (Peter Dopffel, "Entwicklung des Erbrechts in Schweden und Finnland," in Das schwedische Reichsgesetzbuch (Sverige Rikes Lag) von 1734. Beiträge zur Entstehungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte einer vollständigen Kodifikation, ed. W. Wagner [Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1986], 185-269). The German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch of 1900 excluded the illegitimate from their father's intestate inheritance; § 1708 of the code awarded them only maintenance until the age of sixteen in accordance with the mother's status. Under English law, the illegitimate child was filius nullius and accordingly had no inheritance rights until the Family Law Reform Act of 1969 entered into force (Krause, "Creation of Relations of Kinship"; Nigel Lowe and Gillian Douglas, Bromley's Family Law [London: Butterworths, 1998]). Neither could the illegitimate claim support, except via the byway of the Poor Laws: a child's claim to support was judicially enforceable only if the child would otherwise become a burden on the community (John Eekelaar, "Family Law and Social Control," in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence III, eds. John Eekelaar and John Bell [Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1987], 125-46). Bad luck for rich bastards, so to say.

See, e.g., art. 756-761 of Code Napoléon.

Carl Arnholm , "The New Norwegian Legislation Relating to Parents and Children," Scandinavian Studies in Law ( 1959): 11-20.

See Antokolskaia, "Common Origins."

For an overview of the national variations, see Meulders-Klein, La personne, la famille, le droit. Exceptions to the general trend are to be found in Belgian law, in which the father acquires full parental rights by virtue of his recognition alone (art. 374 of Burgerlijk Wetboek), and in Italian law, in which both the father's and the mother's rights are conditional on the fact of living together with the child (art. 317 of Codice Civile).

Jean Carbonnier , Droit civil, I, Introduction à l'étude du droit et droit des personnes (Paris: PUF, 1962).

Bradley, Family Law and Political Culture.

Sieghart Ott , "Die Begriffe `Ehe und Familie' in Art. 6 I GG," Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (1998): 117-19.

A few examples: in England, divorces were, until 1857, granted by act of Parliament, a procedural rule that kept divorce out of the reach of all but the very mighty or wealthy. In the Romanic legal systems that allowed divorce, there were lengthy waiting periods between the initial and the final procedural steps toward a divorce, and special rules of proof were imposed on the litigating parties, such as the rule excluding the parties' confession of their misbehavior as a method of proof (see art. 239-266 and 281-294 of Code Napoléon).

Heinrich Dörner, Industrialisierung und Familienrecht. Die Auswirkungen des sozialen Wandels dargestellt an den Familienmodellen des ALR, BGB und des französischen Code Civil (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974).

For more detail, see Phillips, Putting Asunder.

Wolfram Müller-Freienfels , "Rechtsfolgen nichtehelicher Gemeinschaften und Eheschließungsrecht," in Festschrift für Joachim Gernhuber zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr, 1993), 737-79.

Miroslava Gec-Korosec and Vesna Rijavec , "Slovenia: Post-Independence Changes in Family Law Regulation," University of Louisville Journal of Family Law (1994-1995): 485-93.

Stefanie Heun , Gleichgeschlechtliche Ehen in rechtsvergleichender Sicht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rechtslage in den USA, in Kanada und in Australien (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999).

Müller-Freienfels, "Rechtsfolgen nichtehelicher Gemeinschaften."

Göran Håkansson , "Die rechtliche Behandlung der nichtehelichen Lebensgemeinschaften in Schweden," in Entwicklungen im Recht der Familie und der außerehelichen Lebensgemeinschaften, ed. Uwe Blaurock (Frankfurt-am-Main: Metzner, 1989), 9-20.

Müller-Freienfels, "Rechtsfolgen nichtehelicher Lebensgemeinschaften."

Jacqueline Rubellin-Devichi , "Les grandes réformes en cours dans le droit de la famille en France," in Liber Amicorum Marie-Thérèse Meulders-Klein (Brussels: Bruylant, 1998), 661-96.

For a full description of the process, see, among many, Mary-Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law and Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Meulders-Klein, La personne, la famille, le droit; Phillips, Putting Asunder.

Detailed analyses in the books of Glendon and Meulders-Klein cited above.

This is, for example, the case for Sweden and for some states of the United States (Glendon, Transformation of Family Law).

See section 1 of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973; Stephen Cretney , "Divorce Reform in England: Humbug and Hypocrisy or a Smooth Transition?" in Divorce: Where Next?, ed. Michael Freeman (Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth, 1996), 39-61.

See, for example, art. 306 of the Belgian Civil Code and art. 239, 265, 280-1 and 281 of the French Civil Code.

Oskar Lehner , Familie-Recht-Politik. Die Entwicklung des österreichischen Familienrechts im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wien: Springer, 1987).

Symptomatic for this development is the reformulation of "parental right" into "parental responsibility" in English law (Children Act of 1989). It is not that parents have no rights anymore under English law, but since their rights are seen as purely functional (and thus amendable, abrogeable, etc., if changes in their function would require so), they are defined in terms of what the parents are supposed to do with them. Since these rights/responsibilities are seen as deriving from their social function, the Children Act makes it possible for them to be allocated to persons who have not established any tie of kinship with the children in their care, be it by a biological relation, by marriage to the child's biological mother, or by adoption.

See, for example, the cases of Olsson v. Sweden (1989), Johnsen v. Norway (1996) and K. and T. v. Finland (2000).

For a long-term historical perspective, see Reinhard Sieder, Sozialgeschichte der Familie (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). For data pertaining to contemporary families, see Sara MacLanahan, "The Reproduction of Poverty," American Journal of Sociology (1985): 873-901.

See François Rigaux , "Same-Gender Marriage: A European View ," Journal of Family History 28 (2003): 199-207 (this issue).

See, for example, the still recent cases of Rees (1986) and Cossey (1990) before the European Court of Human Rights. For France: Cass., April 6, 1903, Dalloz Périodique, 1904, I, 395. For Belgium: Trib. Bruxelles, January 23, 1932, Journal des Tribunaux (1932): 178. For England: Lindo v. Belisario (1795), cited by Jackson, The Formation and Annulment of Marriage (London: Butterworths, 1969); J. v. S-T (formerly J)[1997] 1 FLR 402. For the United States: Dean and Gill v. District of Columbia, Family Law Reporter (1995): 2001. Cases are not plenty, for it was only rarely that people of the same gender even dared to aspire to marriage. Jurisprudential statements of the self-evidence of the heterosexual character of marriage are more plentiful. See, among many others, Stephen Cretney, Principles of Family Law (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1976); René Dekkers, Handboek burgerlijk recht, vol. 1 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1972); François Laurent, Principes de droit civil, vol. 2 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1887).

United States: Singer v. Hara, 11 Wash. App. 247, 522 P. 2d 1187. Germany: Hans Dölle, Familienrecht. Darstellung des deutschen Familienrechts mit rechtsvergleichenden Hinweisen, vol. 1 (Karlsruhe: Müller, 1964). In England, same-gender marriages were held to be inexistent until the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973 (Jackson, Formation of Marriage), after which they were void under section 11 of the act.

Germany: BverfG, July 29, 1959, Entscheidungen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, 10, 59; BverfG, October 4, 1993, Zeitschrift für das gesamte Familienrecht (1993): 1419.

Svensk forfättningssammling, 1987, 813.

For the Scandinavian laws: Peter Dopffel and Jens Scherpe, "Gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensgemeinschaften im Recht der nordischen Länder," in Die Rechtsstellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Lebensgemeinschaften, eds. Jürgen Basedow, Klaus Hopt, Hein Kötz, and Peter Dopffel (Tübingen: Mohr, 2000), 7-49. For the Netherlands: Katharina Boele-Woelki and Wendy Schrama, "Die Rechtsstellung von Menschen mit homosexueller Veranlagung im niederländischen Recht," in Die Rechtsstellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Lebensgemeinschaften, eds. Basedow et al., 51-112. For Vermont: personal communication, Harry Krause.

Laws of December 21, 2000, "tot wijziging van Boek I van het Burgerlijk Wetboek in verband met de openstelling van het huwelijk voor personen van hetzelfde geslacht" and "tot wijziging van Boek I van het Burgerlijk Wetboek (adoptie door personen van hetzelfde geslacht)," Staatsblad (2001): 9-10. For the debates leading up to this reform, see Boele-Woelki and Schrama, "Rechtsstellung von Menschen mit homosexueller Veranlagung"; Caroline Forder, "The Netherlands: Opening Up Marriage to Same Sex Partners and Providing for Adoption by Same Sex Couples, Managing Information on Sperm Donors, and Lots of Private International Law," in The International Survey of Family Law 2000, ed. Andrew Bainham (Bristol: Jordan, 2000), 239-77.

Harry Krause , "U.S. American Law on Same-Sex Marriage, Formal and Informal Same-Sex and Heterosexual Cohabitation Arrangements, and Same-Sex Relationships," in Die Rechtsstellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Lebensgemeinschaften, eds. Basedow et al., 187-273.

Jens Scherpe , "10 Jahre registrierte Partnerschaft in Dänemark. Zur Novellierung des Gesetzes von 1989," Deutsches und Europäisches Familienrecht (2000): 32-37.

Frédérique Ferrand, "Die Rechtsstellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Partnerschaften in Frankreich," in Die Rechtsstellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Lebensgemeinschaften, eds. Basedow et al., 113-44; Susanne Schlenker, "Die Stellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Lebensgemeinschaften in Spanien und in spanischen Teilrechtsordnungen," in Die Rechtsstellung gleichgeschlechtlicher Lebensgemeinschaften, eds. Basedow et al., 145-66; Jean-Louis Renchon, "Mariage, cohabitation légale et union libre," in Liber Amicorum Marie-Thérèse Meulders-Klein (Brussels: Bruylant, 1998), 549-73.

Antokolskaia, "Common Tendencies"; John Gilissen, Historische inleiding tot het recht (Antwerp: Kluwer, 1981). Beryl Rawson, "The Roman Family," in The Family in Ancient Rome, ed. Beryl Rawson (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 1-57, complains about this misunderstanding among historians.

Wolfram Müller-Freienfels, Ehe und Recht (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962); Glendon, Transformation of Family Law; Martin Grosse, Freie Römische Ehe und nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaft (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1991).

W.K. Lacey , "Patria potestas," in The Family in Ancient Rome, 121-44.

Rawson, "The Roman Family."

Grosse, Freie Römische Ehe.

Suzanne Dixon , "The Marriage Alliance in the Roman Elite," Journal of Family History (1985): 353-78.

Jack Goody , The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Grosse, Freie Römische Ehe.

For the relevant information: Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974); Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983); Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: I. A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Geoffrey de Sainte-Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981).

Keith Hopkins, "Elite Mobility in the Roman Empire," in Studies in Ancient Society, ed. Moses Finley (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1974), 103-20; P. R. C. Weaver, "Social Mobility in the Early Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Imperial Freedmen and Slaves," in Studies in Ancient Society, 121-40.

Yan Thomas , "A Rome, pères citoyens et cité des pères (IIe siècle av. J.C.-IIe siècle ap. J.C.)," in Histoire de la famille, I, Mondes lointains, mondes anciens, eds. André Burguière , Christiane Klapisch-Zuber , Martine Segalen , and Françoise Zonabend (Paris: Colin, 1986), 195-229.

All the data in this paragraph are borrowed from the following works by William J. Goode (practically the only one to have drawn attention to the phenomenon): World Revolution and Family Patterns; "World Changes in Divorce Patterns," in Economic Consequences of Divorce: The International Perspective, eds. Lenore Weitzman and Mavis MacLean (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1992), 11-49; World Changes in Divorce Patterns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). The interpretations are mine.

At first sight, this would seem to make divorce a unilateral business, entirely dependent on the male's whim. But such is not the case. From reports on Malaysian and Indonesian divorce, it appears that it was and is quite habitual for wives intentionally to provoke their husbands into repudiating them by publicly insulting them (Goode, World Changes in Divorce Patterns).

As appears from many examples in Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), originally written in the first and second decades of the second century.

Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change.

Colin Turnbull , "The Mbuti Pygmies: An Ethnographic Survey," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History ( 1965): 145-282.

This rather vague term in this text refers to mainland China before the declaration of the republic in 1912. It must be pointed out, however, that many of the patriarchal practices that conflicted with the principles of the modernization that started from 1912 onwards survived the Chinese Revolution of 1911-1912 and were only abolished under Maoism.

Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive.

Grosse, Freie römische Ehe.

Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive.

Ibid.; Rawson, "The Roman Family"; P. R. C. Weaver, "The Status of Children in Mixed Marriages," in The Family in Ancient Rome, 145-70.

To be sure, adoption was well known in Greece and widespread in China. But it was much less used in Greece than in Rome, and its use in China served different purposes than in Rome. Whereas in Rome adults were adopted to bring them into a family where a vital position (that of paterfamilias) would, in the near future, have to be filled, in China, small girls or, more exceptionally, boys were adopted to socialize them, from the beginning onwards, within the family in which they would have to play the comparatively less vital role of a daughter-in-law or son-in-law.

Werner Vontobel , "Vermögen erarbeitet man nicht -man erbt sie ," Reformatio (1999): 331-37.

Compare, for example, Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1990); Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

For more explanations, see Robin Fox , Kinship and Marriage (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967).

Overviews in Fox, Kinship and Marriage; George Murdock, Social Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949); David Schneider and Kathleen Gough, eds., Matrilineal Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).

Kathleen Gough , "The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1959): 23-34.

Rome: Thomas, "Pères citoyens"; Japan: Patrick Beillevaire, "Le Japon, une société de la maison," in Histoire de la famille, I, Mondes lointains, mondes anciens, eds. André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, and Françoise Zonabend (Paris: Colin, 1986), 479-517.

Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive.

Peter Dopffel , "Entwicklung des Erbrechts in Schweden und Finnland," in Das schwedische Reichsgesetzbuch (Sveriges Rikes lag) von 1734. Beiträge zur Entstehungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte einer vollständigen Kodifikation , ed. W. Wagner (Frankfurt-am-Main : Klostermann, 1987), 185-269.

Anders Agell , "The Swedish Legislation on Marriage and Cohabitation: A Journey without a Destination," Scandinavian Studies in Law (1980): 9-48.

The data used in the following paragraph are borrowed as follows: for the Mbuti, from Turnbull, "The Mbuti Pygmies" and Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants (New York: Natural History Press, 1965); for the !Kung, from Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992).

Fox, Kinship and Marriage; Murdock, Social Structure; Schneider and Gough, Matrilineal Kinship.

Judith Brown, "Economic Organization and the Position of Women among the Iroquois," Ethnohistory (1970): 151-67; John Noon, Law and Government of the Grand River Iroquois (New York: Viking Fund, 1949).

Gough, "The Nayars."

Peter Foote and David Wilson, The Viking Achievement (London: Sidgwick, 1970); Jón Hjaltalín, "Rights of Women among the Old Scandinavians," Journal of Jurisprudence (1872): 505-26.

Geoffrey de Sainte-Croix , The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981).

Fisher, Anatomy of Love; Eleanor Leacock, "Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution," Current Anthropology (1978): 247-55 and 268-75; Karen Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979).

Turnbull, "The Mbuti Pygmies."

Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed, 1987); Françoise Héritier, "Le sang du guerrier et le sang des femmes. Notes anthropologiques sur les rapports des sexes," in L'africaine. Sexes et signes (Paris: Tierce, 1985), 7-21; Melville Herskovits, "A Note on `Woman Marriage' in Dahomey," Africa (1937): 335-41; Hugo Huber, " `Woman-Marriage' in Some East African Societies," Anthropos (1968-1969): 744-52; Eileen Jensen Krige, "Woman-Marriage, with Special Reference to the Lovedu: Its Significance for the Definition of Marriage," Africa (1974): 11-36; Regina Smith Oboler, "Is the Female Husband a Man? Woman/Woman Marriage among the Nandi of Kenya," Ethnology (1980): 69-88. For an interpretation of these data to which I owe much, see Peter Rivière, "Marriage: A Reassessment," in Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, ed. Rodney Needham (London: Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, 1971), 57-74.

A similar function was fulfilled until recently by the institution of "sworn virgins" in rural areas of the Balkan, where inheritance was patrilineal and the structure of authority severely patriarchal. Again, since the absence of a suitable candidate to fill the male role within the family economy has devastating consequences in such a system, functional alternatives have to be provided. Sworn virgins were biological women who, when the need arose, took on the responsibilities of head of the farm, dressed like a man, did men's work, and were held to the duties involved in the blood feud. They were called "sworn virgins" because, upon changing their gender identity, they had to swear an oath of perpetual virginity. Having sex with a man would have revealed them to be female after all and would thus have destroyed their carefully built male identity. Antonia Young, Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

Gerald Devereux, "Institutionalized Homosexuality among the Mohave Indians," Human Biology (1937): 498-529; Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, Het superdier. Het oer-patroon in mens en samenleving (Bloemendaal: Nelissen, 1978); Wolfgang Wickler and Uta Seibt, Männlich, weiblich. Ein Naturgesetz und seine Folgen (Heidelberg: Spektrum, 1998).

Devereux, "Institutionalized Homosexuality."

Fisher, Anatomy of Love; Turnbull, "The Mbuti Pygmies."

Among the Aborigines, rights to the use of certain stretches of land are essential to survival, and complex kinship rules regulate which individuals belong to which kin group and consequently have certain rights to the land. Because the relations between kin groups are equally complex and depend on the systematic "exchange" of women (no true exchange, because the women are not exchanged between two groups but redistributed among many groups according to fine-tuned rules), marriages are arranged by the elders when the children are still very young. See, for example, Mervyn Meggitt, Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

Turnbull, Wayward Servants.

The data on the Inuit are borrowed from Günter Dux, Die Spur der Macht im Verhältnis der Geschlechter (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Pamela Stern and Richard Condon, "A Good Spouse Is Hard to Find: Marriage, Spouse Exchange, and Infatuation among the Copper Inuit," in Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? ed. William Jankowiak (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 196-218.

A point stressed time and again by both representatives of neo-institutional economic theory (e.g., Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital [New York: Bantam, 2000]; Thraín Eggertsson, Economic Behavior and Institutions [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990]; Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991]) and by contemporary Marxists (e.g., G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History [Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1978]).

For a comparative overview of the rules, see Barbara Willenbacher, "Individualism and Traditionalism in Inheritance Law in Germany, France, England, and the United States," Journal of Family History 28 (2003): 208-225 (this issue), and also Holthöfer, "Fortschritte in der Erbrechtsgesetzgebung."

Stephen Cretney and Judith Masson , Principles of Family Law ( London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1997 ).

In England, the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act of 1975 gives the surviving spouse (and, under more stringent conditions, other dependants of the deceased) a claim to "reasonable financial provision" out of the inheritance, regardless of the will of the deceased. The courts give quite an extensive interpretation to the notion of "reasonable financial provision": it may go far beyond what is necessary to cover basic material security and may, if the estate is large, very well amount to several hundred thousand pounds. See Brenda Hoggett and David Pearl, The Family, Law and Society: Cases and Materials (London: Butterworths, 1991).

Nigel Lowe and Gillian Douglas , Bromley's Family Law (London : Butterworths, 1998).

Janet Finch, "Inheritance and Financial Transfer in Families," in The New Generational Contract: Intergenerational Relations, Old Age and Welfare, ed. Alan Walker (London: UCL Press, 1996), 120-34; Wolfgang Lauterbach, "Familiensystem und Vermögensübertragung -Zur Bedeutung einer Erbschaft für Erben und Erblasser," in Verwandschaft, eds. Michael Wagner and Yvonne Schütze (Stuttgart: Enke, 1998), 237-62.

This point was already forcefully made by the classical legal theorist Karl Renner in Die Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929). It is elaborated in Harry Willekens, "Kapitalisme, vrijheid, gelijkheid en erfrecht," in Contestatie van ons erfrecht, ed. Harry Willekens (Ghent: Mys, 2001), 1-23.

Overviews of these reforms are to be found in Meulders-Klein, La personne, la famille, le droit; Patrick Senaeve, Het vaderschap van de echtgenoot (Antwerp: Kluwer, 1982); La réforme du droit de la filiation: Perspectives européennes , ed. Johan Pauwels ( Brussels: Bruylant, 1981).