University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Articles Faculty Scholarship 2015 With Marriage on the Decline and Cohabitation on the Rise, What about Marital Rights for Unmarried Partners? Lawrence W. Waggoner University of Michigan Law School,
[email protected] Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/1762 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles Part of the Contracts Commons, Family Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation Waggoner, Lawrence W. "With Marriage on the Decline and Cohabitation on the Rise, What about Marital Rights for Unmarried Partners?" ACTEC L. J. 41, no. 1 (2015): 49-93. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. With Marriage on the Decline and Cohabitation on the Rise, What about Marital Rights for Unmarried Partners?* Lawrence W. Waggoner** This article draws attention to a cultural shift in the formation of families that has been and is taking place in this country and in the developed world. Part I uses recent government data to trace the decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 9.71%, but the husband and wife households only grew by 3.7%, while the unmarried couple households grew by 41.4%.