ABSTRACT
Social forces impacting the prevalence of marriage and alternative modes of cohabitation/partnership shaped Marvin and its progeny, and these decisions cannot be said to simply reflect personal ideologies of the judges who made them. From a halakhic perspective, cohabitation is equivalent to civil marriage. In Jewish law, the illegality of a relationship is not an impediment to enforcing cohabitation agreements. But given that, Jewish law is by definition a religious legal system, its decisors may, out of policy concerns, choose to consider these contracts unenforceable so as to assure the integrity of Jewish law and sustain the nuclear family as its paradigm. In American law, some jurisdictions have held that contracts between parties to a non-marital union involve immoral consideration and are therefore against public policy and hence unenforceable. Without accepting the socially-defined status of marriage, parties can enter any type of contractual relationship they wish without fear that the relationship will be deemed a de facto marriage.
