Liberty and Community in Marriage: Expanding on Massey’s Proposal for a Community Property Option in New Hampshire

This article argues that intimate partners should have the right to adopt a sharing economy within marriage. Forty-one U.S. states employ a separate property regime for property acquired during marriage; of these, only two allow married couples to opt out of the separate property system and hold their assets as community property. Nine U.S. states are community property states. To encourage equal partnership in marriage, Calvin Massey proposed that New Hampshire, a separate property state, enable a community property option. This essay expands on Massey’s proposal by comparing it to three other marriage reform proposals: two based on privatization, and another focused on equitable distribution laws. To be sure, all four reforms refer to market-metrics, but only the community property option proposal allows for the qualitative claim that an individual has a right to enter into and maintain a marriage between economic equals. Massey’s view was that the state should enable, not frustrate such a right. For this and other reasons, this essay develops a comparative and analytic foundation for Massey’s community property option proposal

Review of \u3ci\u3eNative Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity.\u3c/i\u3e By Joanne Barker

Native Acts is organized in three parts. In the first ( Recognition ), Barker (correctly) argues that the United States government exercised its plenary power to coerce Native peoples to recognize themselves as Indian tribes. In part 2 ( Membership ), she discusses tribal membership policies as a legal frame through which Native peoples-now organized into semisovereign states called tribes -define themselves in relation to the U.S. government. In part 3 ( Tradition ), Barker examines how tribal traditions can turn on racist, sexist, and homophobic policies that themselves become cultural acts of identity formation. Federal Indian Law-the body of federal law that governs the relationship between the U.S. government and a recognized tribe-is ossified with just the sort of doctrines and inherited traditions that Barker thoughtfully calls into question. She frames the paradox well. Historically, tribes secured federal recognition if and when they defined themselves in terms that furthered colonialist, social Darwinist ideologies