The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation
From Fornicators to Family, 1600–2010

A radical revision of existing ideas about the popularity, legal treatment and perceptions of cohabitation between 1600 and 2010.

Rebecca Probert (Author)

9781107020849, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 September 2012

298 pages, 5 b/w illus.
25.3 x 18 x 2 cm, 0.69 kg

'… a truly fresh perspective on the legal regulation of cohabitation … The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation makes an important contribution to the academic discourse in this area. This scholarly contribution is insightful, detailed and rigorously argued by the author. Furthermore, the book's contribution s also timely in light of the current debate surrounding the granting of statutory rights and remedies to cohabitants upon relationship breakdown. Therefore, within a specific field of the legal regulation of cohabitation, this book will undoubtedly have both considerable impact and also a wide readership.' Andrew Hayward, Cambridge Law Journal

This book has three key aims: first, to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has changed over the past four centuries, from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth; second, to chart how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time and how different terms influenced policy debates and public perceptions; and, third, to estimate the extent of cohabitation in earlier centuries. To achieve this it draws on hundreds of reported and unreported cases as well as legislation, policy papers and debates in Parliament; thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles; and innovative cohort studies that provide new and more reliable evidence as to the incidence (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. It concludes with a consideration of the relationship between legal regulation and social trends.

1. Introduction
2. Fornicators: the punishment of illicit sex
3. No name: law, morality and precedent
4. Unmarried wives in war and peace
5. Living in sin: concerns and changes
6. 'Stable illicit unions': cohabitation and the reform of divorce law
7. Common-law wives: the 1970s and the creation of a myth
8. Live-in lovers: trying to get back to basics
9. Partners: New Labour and neutrality
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Family law: cohabitation [LNMC], Family law [LNM], Population & demography [JHBD], Social & cultural history [HBTB]