Just Marriage

Extract

Just Marriage. By Mary Lyndon Shanley, with Commentators. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 116p. $45.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Should marriage as we know it be abolished? This is one proposed solution to the injustices of marriage today: unjust to those excluded from access to it, to those who might like it but cannot find a partner, and to those who choose other forms of relationships or even consider marriage oppressive. Or does marriage remain an institution so bound up with social needs, such as child raising and care for dependents, that the state cannot abdicate regulatory authority over it? Mary Lyndon Shanley argues the latter position.