Economic Dimensions of International Regulation of Marriage

Development summary

Nicole Štýbnarová’s article in The American Journal of Comparative Law examines the economic functions of regulating transnational marriages and of the legal argumentation surrounding them. Taking contemporary frameworks in Northwestern Europe as its point of departure, it considers private international law, migration law and human rights law, and argues that lawmakers and judges tend to frame such marriages in human rights terms, thereby suggesting that universal marriage standards exist or should exist. The article further contends that this understanding was legally consolidated by the 1962 United Nations Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages, whereas earlier discourse in former imperial metropoles had been shaped by “marriage relativism”, which treated Western and non-Western forms of marriage as distinct.