Professor Chris Barton - Domestic Partnership Contracts: Sliced Bread or a Slice of the Bread?

Professor Chris Barton Retired Family Law Teacher and a Vice-President of the Family Mediators Association.
The Tenth Law Commission Programme announced in June 2008 includes a commitment to review pre-marital contracts (PMCs). The purpose of this article is to look at recent suggestions for and attitudes towards these arrangements and then to consider how the law might best deal with them and with cohabitation contracts: 'These contracts often have very similar terms as marriage contracts and many if not all of the same reasons exist for their use' (Maintenance and Capital Provision on Divorce: Recommendations for Reform of the Law and Procedure made by the Family Law Committee (The Law Society 1991)).

In the last 35 years or so domestic partnership contracts (DPCs) as perceived by lawyers the government journalists fiction writers the public and even some affianced have undergone a sea change. In the 1970s Pamela Gray's cohabitation contract precedent (PN Gray 'A New Lease of Life. Precedent for a Cohabitation Contract' (1973) 123 New Law Journal 591) was promptly and sternly rebuked in that publication's correspondence column (see (1973) 123 New...

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