In 2021, the Parliament of the Irish Republic—as the last legislature in Great Britain and Ireland—abolished an Act to Prevent the Marriage of Lunatics. This Act had its origins in a British statute of 1742, which was subsequently extended to Ireland and was in force in all parts of the British isles from 1811 until 1959, when it was abolished for England and Wales. The Act has been almost completely ignored by (legal) history. Quite undeservedly so, for it may claim to be the first English general act since the Elizabethan settlement to interfere with the traditional canon law of marriage, predating the much more famous Hardwicke Marriage Act by more than a decade. It rendered absolutely void the marriages of persons who had been found lunatic by commission under the Great Seal or whose persons and estates had been placed under trustees by Act of Parliament. Such persons could no longer contract a valid marriage after 24 June 1742, not even during a lucid interval, unless they had first been declared of sound mind by the Lord Chancellor or other competent authority. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that unsuitable marriages by lunatics constituted a widespread social problem in mid-eighteenth-century England. Given the English reluctance to pass general acts in this period, why was the esoteric topic of lunatics’ marriage singled out for general legislative treatment, rather than being dealt with—like the thorny issue of divorce—through private acts on a case-by-case basis? This paper seeks to answer that puzzle. In doing so, it explores the intersection of marriage law, property protection, elite family strategy, and parliamentary power, taking us into the worlds of high society and high politics in eighteenth-century Britain.
Tuesday, May 512:45-1:45 PM (PT)
Room 320D, Stanford Law Schooland via ZoomTo RSVP, click here.
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