Before Loving: the Lost Origins of the Right to Marry

University at Buffalo School of Law Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 1-1-2020 Before Loving: The Lost Origins of the Right to Marry Michael Boucai University at Buffalo School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/journal_articles Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the Sexuality and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Michael Boucai, Before Loving: The Lost Origins of the Right to Marry, 2020 Utah L. Rev. 69 (2020). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/journal_articles/968 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BEFORE LOVING: THE LOST ORIGINS OF THE RIGHT TO MARRY Michael Boucai* Abstract For almost two centuries of this nation’s history, the basic contours of the fundamental right to marry were fairly clear as a matter of natural, not constitutional, law. The right encompassed marriage’s essential characteristics: conjugality and contract, portability and permanence. This Article defines those four dimensions of the natural right to marry and describes their reflections and contradictions in positive law prior to Loving v. Virginia (1967). In that landmark case, the Supreme Court enforced a constitutional “freedom to marry” just when marriage’s definitive attributes were on the brink of legal collapse. Not only did wedlock proceed in Loving’s wake to lose its exclusive claims to licit sex and legitimate procreation, personal autonomy in those very domains gained independent constitutional protection. Drained of its conjugal essence, today’s constitutional right to marry is thus an anachronism, the vestige of a bygone consensus about what, if anything, “marriage” fundamentally is. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 70 I. NATURAL MARRIAGE ..................................................................................... 77 II. “A THING OF NATURAL RIGHT” .................................................................... 90 A. The Conjugal Right to Marry .................................................................... 91 1. Sex and Procreation .............................................................................. 94 2. Parenthood and Cohabitation? .............................................................. 99 3. The Conjugal Right in Positive Law ..................................................... 103 * © 2020 Michael Boucai. Associate Professor, University at Buffalo School of Law. I am grateful to the many interlocutors whose wisdom and encouragement enabled this study: Erez Aloni, Christine Bartholomew, Mark Bartholomew, Anya Bernstein, Guyora Binder, Luke Boso, Douglas Brown, Luis Chiesa, Jessica Clarke, Maxime Fleuriot, Lucinda Finley, Jim Gardner, Joe Gerken, Jill Hasday, Janet Halley, Amanda Hughett, Courtney Joslin, Isabel Marcus, Kevin Maillard, Jonathan Manes, Kaipo Matsumura, David McNamee, Martha McCluskey, Athena Mutua, Doug NeJaime, Tony O’Rourke, Frank Oveis, Nancy Polikoff, Dave Pozen, Orly Rachmilovitz, Karla Raimundi, Cliff Rosky, Jack Schlegel, Ed Stein, Matt Steilen, Rick Su, Tico Taussig-Rubbo, and Marsha Zubrow. I thank John Mondo and the staff of the Charles B. Sears Law Library for their heroic pursuit of sources. I thank Whitney McKiddy and the members of the Utah Law Review for their insights and professionalism. And I thank Katherine Bruno, Noreena Chaudari, Katie Gojevic, Stan Makowski, Melanie Prasad, and William Rossi for excellent research assistance. Errors of fact and judgment are mine alone. 69 70 UTAH LAW REVIEW [NO. 1 B. The Contractual Right to Marry .............................................................. 107 1. The Right Not to Marry ........................................................................ 111 2. The Right to Marry by Mutual Consent ................................................ 114 3. A Right to Marry the Person of One’s Choice?..................................... 129 C. The Right to Stay Married ....................................................................... 134 1. Portability ........................................................................................... 134 2. Permanence ......................................................................................... 139 III. THE CONSTITUTIONAL RISE OF THE NATURAL RIGHT TO MARRY ............... 150 A. Before Skinner ........................................................................................ 151 B. From Skinner to Loving .......................................................................... 158 IV. FROM LOVING TO LAWRENCE ...................................................................... 165 A. Loving’s Natural Right to Marry ............................................................. 165 B. Decline and Fall ..................................................................................... 170 CONCLUSION: AFTER OBERGEFELL ................................................................... 173 There are . in legal consciousness at any moment, concepts that legal thinkers find in . a preceding age, and perhaps themselves mouth ritualistically, without any confidence that they have a meaning.1 INTRODUCTION The fundamental right to marry is a paradox in contemporary American jurisprudence: repeatedly and reverently affirmed by the Supreme Court, but viewed with puzzlement, skepticism, even outright disbelief by legal scholars. On the judicial side of the ledger, we encounter a line of precedents stretching from Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), with its fleeting invocation of a “right . to . marry, establish a home and bring up children,” to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which extended the marriage right to same-sex couples.2 The case that definitively identified marriage as a constitutional right was decided about midway between those two rulings. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Court held that prohibitions of interracial marriage violate the Fourteenth Amendment, violating both the Equal Protection Clause and an independent “freedom to marry” anchored in the Due Process Clause.3 Since that landmark decision, the Court has consistently cast marriage as the most august, central, and specific among a family of freedoms—privacy, intimate association, sexual autonomy, the rights to procreate and not to procreate—traveling together under the banner of “substantive due process.”4 That doctrine is notoriously 1 DUNCAN KENNEDY, THE RISE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL LEGAL THOUGHT 70 (1975). 2 Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923); Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 2600–01 (2015) (quoting Meyer, 262 U.S. at 399). 3 Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967). 4 See, e.g., Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. at 2599; Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 726 (1997); Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851– 2020] BEFORE LOVING 71 controversial, but Loving has gone to show that it cannot possibly be all wrong. Justices who quarrel vehemently over the bounds of due-process “liberty” evince shared faith that marriage, though “nowhere mentioned” in the Constitution, is a fundamental right thereunder.5 To legal scholars, Loving’s “freedom to marry” comes as a challenge, a riddle. Our quandary originates in the fact that every decision vindicating the right involves access to civil matrimony, a state-run institution. Is that really what “the freedom to marry” guarantees? If so, access to marital status would be one of few unenumerated, positive entitlements gleaned from a constitution reductively but not unaccountably styled a “charter of negative liberties.”6 Hypotheticals about marriage abolition are 52 (1992); Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297, 312 n.18 (1980); Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 152–54, 159 (1973). 5 Casey, 505 U.S. at 847–48 (referring to marriage and citing Loving); cf. id. at 951–53 (1992) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (distinguishing Loving’s right to marry from the right to abortion). For similarly competing uses of Loving’s right to marry, compare Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 499, 503 (1977) with Moore, 431 U.S. at 535–56 (Stewart, J., dissenting); compare Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 191, 204–05 (1986) with Bowers, 478 U.S. at 210 n. 5 (Blackmun, J., dissenting); and compare Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. at 2598, 2602–03 (2015) with Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. at 2614–15, 2619 (Roberts, C.J., dissenting). In 1978, Justices Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist expressed doubt as to whether the marriage right was properly called “fundamental,” but less than a decade later they joined an opinion holding a Missouri prison regulation to violate “the fundamental right to marry.” Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374, 396–403, 407–11 (1978) (Powell, J., concurring and Rehnquist, J., dissenting); Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 81, 94–99 (1987). Since Turner, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, has come closer than any member of the Court to flatly repudiating the constitutional right to marry. His discussion of the right assumes only arguendo that “the ‘liberty’” protected by the Due Process Clause embraces anything beyond “freedom from physical restraint.” Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. at 2634 (Thomas, J.,

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