ABSTRACT
The legal treatment of cohabitation in the United States has been radically and rapidly transformed during the first few years of the twenty-first century. Two states (Vermont and Massachusetts) have now extended all of the benefits of marriage under state law to same-sex cohabitants, and another (California) is poised to do so in January 2005. Other states and localities offer variegated bundles of rights to cohabitants in domestic partnerships, typically but not always excluding opposite-sex partners. There are great regional variances-from Massachusetts, where marriage will become available to same-sex couples in May 2004, to Nebraska, where the state constitution was amended in 2000 to prohibit recognition not only of same-sex marriage but also of civil unions or domestic partnerships of any sort (Neb Const, Art I, § 29). Similar variety exists as to opposite-sex cohabitants. The state of Washington grants many of the benefits of marriage to all cohabitants, both same-and opposite-sex, while Illinois extends no recognition at all to cohabitants, for fear that to do so would somehow denigrate the institution of marriage.
