Marriage Proposals: From One-Size-Fits-All to Postmodern Marriage Law
THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF COLE PORTER 121 (Robert Kimball ed., 1983).
While it has been suggested that Porter may be legal authority since he has been cited by Justice Scalia, Stephen M. Feldman, The Supreme Court in a Postmodern World: A Flying Elephant, 84 MINN. L. REV. 673, 693- 97 (2000), that is not my purpose here. Rather, Anything Goes is background music, suggesting two major underlying themes of this Article. First, there is a widespread perception that “anything goes” with respect to contemporary marriage. We tend to think of this perception as “new,” and even mildly daring, notwithstanding exhaustive evidence of its historical repetition, just as we endlessly rediscover Porter. Second, we are more likely to notice the availability of divergent norms, and to address them,Porter does) in times of economic upheaval, such as the thirties (when Porter wrote the play for...