Navigating legal protections for cohabiting and economic relationships: can the market/home dichotomy guide us?

ABSTRACT

Many Western jurisdictions take a split approach to protecting the economically vulnerable party in private relationships. In the family sphere, many jurisdictions are reluctant to intervene in intimate partner relationships, particularly outside the marital context. This lack of legal protection often leaves the economically vulnerable partner in a precarious financial position at the end of the relationship. By contrast, legal protections for vulnerable parties are much more common in the economic sphere. This article explores this split approach to protecting the vulnerable partner in private relationships through the lens of the market/home dichotomy. It focuses on the Belgian regulation for unmarried cohabiting partners on the one hand, and for tenants, consumers, and employees on the other hand. The article concludes that the dichotomy has value as an explanatory framework for the divergent norms of cohabiting and economic relationships, but that it is most useful as a heuristic framework for challenging the ideologies that inspire the market and the family. Incorporating the viewpoint of non-traditional families only adds to that conclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Market/home dichotomy
• public/private divide
• unmarried cohabitation
• cohabiting relationships
• feminist legal theory
• separate spheres

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Ursula Basset, Martha A. Fineman, Hila Keren, Dafni Lima, Alice Margaria, Marie Spinoy, the anonymous reviewers, and the participants to the 2024 Workshop ‘FLT at 40: The Family and the Constitution of Everyday Life’ at Emory University School of Law for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. I have benefited greatly from their insightful feedback, which will continue to shape my scholarship in the years to come. All remaining mistakes are my own.