Will discusses the relatively new institution of covenant marriage below. I agree that it should be legal, and in fact don't share his discomfort with the idea. One wonders, though, whether proponents would also support especially lax marriages for those who want that. I would guess not.

I'm really writing, though, to note that multiple types of marriage aren't at all a new development. In ancient Rome women (or their fathers) had the choice to be married in manu or otherwise. If she chose the former, she would pass "into the hands" of her husband, and lose a considerable range of rights, including any rights to an inheritance from her own father. On the other hand, she would now inherit as if she was her husband's daughter - and would therefore be the heir to even his father's estate under the somewhat byzantine Roman property system. Our evidence from Cicero indicates these two kinds of marriage co-existed for at least a century, and that even though marriage in manu was seen as the more sacred, most people chose just to get hitched the normal way. History revolves once again.

UPDATE: I did mean to add, before my connection went down, that if the policy objection to covenant marriage is that people might improvidently enter these especially binding agreements, we might compromise by only providing covenant marriage as an "upgrade" for an established couple. But as I note above, I don't think that protection is necessary.

A friend sends along this investigation into Netflix's means of allocating DVDs among its subscribers when there are shortages. The basic allegation is that Netflix prefers new or high-revenue customers over others, which is little surprise as a theoretical matter, and is similar to my own experience. I recall the heady days when I faced barely a four-day turnaround before getting a new DVD. Now a week is more standard.

I have been meaning to complain to them, but the relevant Netflix customer service number proved as elusive to me as the famed Amazon customer service number. Even now that my girlfriend has uncovered it for me, I am currently too conflict-averse to bother. If Netflix is indeed making the calculated choice to give better service to others than to me, this is exactly what they are counting on, and so I find it annoying to be playing into their hands, but not yet annoying enough to rouse me to action. Now, if I have trouble getting speedy access to West Wing DVDs when Season 4 appears in April, that would be a different matter.

UPDATE: Here is more data on the issue.

My Tax Professor Alstott, on a question of law and marriage different from the one I discuss below:

Death is not death when it comes to taxes. We will find you!

I am generally of the belief that people must be given broad latitude to bind and promise themselves (with some procedural, rather than substantive, safeguards), and also of the belief that in matters of romance, the state should be relatively tolerant of varying conceptions of the good.

Given this, I have always had a hard time explaining my own uneasiness with the covenant marriage movement, featured in the New York Times today.

I agree (for once) with Sara Butler and Jennifer Morse that it is hard to see why contract law should give preference to the generation of business partnerships rather than families. So I will be true to my Libertarian creds and say that people ought to be allowed to make their rights to divorce much harder to exercise if they wish to. (But should states extend benefits to covenant marriages that they don't extend to other ones? I think not.)

All the same, even if the practice should be legal, it makes me very uneasy, and not just because many people may consent to binding contracts without realizing what they are getting into (that is life). It makes me uneasy because despite my libertarian sensibility, I do have my own views of healthy relationships. While there is something to be said for romantic commitments, there is also something to be said for a continuing bargain, where people are together not because anything is keeping them there but simply because they want to stay.

But again, far be it from me to force others to adhere only to my (current) conception of marriage, however unwise I think theirs is.

UPDATE: Phoebe Maltz concurs:

I'd have to say I agree with him. But what I don't totally understand (from a social, not legal, perspective) is how covenant marriage can exist without making regular marriage start to seem flaky, to say nothing of civil unions, which, under the new framework, start to look a bit like agreements to be dates to a junior high school dance. Ideally, if marriage has to be written into law at all, there'd be just one thing, called marriage, and couples could define it as they see fit, and take it as seriously as they'd like within the bounds of the contract. If covenant marriage takes off, heterosexual couples who choose marriage over covenant marriage will start to seem unsure about the commitment they're making. Also, if one partner wants a marriage and the other would prefer a covenant, that could potentially be a large but otherwise avoidable source of conflict.