Research comparing the relative significance of economic exchange theories and gender norms on parents' division of income‐producing and domestic responsibilities often fails to consider sufficiently the role that marriage may play. This article shows that, in the United States, numerous aspects of state and federal law relating to marriage encourage spouses to specialize in distinct breadwinning and caretaking roles. Same‐sex marriage offers new opportunities to assess the importance of marriage in household labor allocation decisions while controlling for gender. For any data gathered before June 2015, however, it may be distorting to characterize same‐sex couples as simply “married” or “unmarried”; rather, legal recognition during the past 10 years is better conceptualized as discrete bundles of rights and tracked accordingly. This article, written by a legal scholar, provides substantive legal analysis that is integral to developing a research agenda in this area.

In recent years, domestic violence legislation has migrated out of its traditional locus in family law and criminal law to include a rapidly growing body of employment law. The new laws respond to a relatively simple problem: Economic security is one of the most important factors in whether a victim of domestic violence will be able to separate from an abusive partner, but domestic violence often interferes with victims' ability to maintain jobs, thus causing job loss that further traps victims in abusive relationships. By providing support to victims and empowering employers to take direct legal action against perpetrators of actual or threatened workplace violence, the new legislation helps employers and employees work together to address a shared interest in reducing the effects of domestic violence on the workplace. Thus, addressing domestic violence as an "employment" issue bolsters other strategies for combating domestic violence. Equally important, because the vast majority of victims of domestic violence are women, the new legislation complements traditional employment laws, such as Title VII and the Family and Medical Leave Act, that seek to promote sex equality by addressing a significant, though little recognized, barrier to women's full participation in the workplace. This Article situates the burgeoning body of new state legislation within developments in domestic violence law and employment law, particularly those relating to accommodation of individual needs within the workplace. It shows that domestic violence legislation modeled on employment law accommodation mandates, such as the Fam

This article brings together legal, historical, and social science research to analyze how couples allocate income-producing and domestic responsibilities. It develops a framework-what I call the marriage equation-that shows how sex-based classifications, (non-sex-specific) substantive marriage law, and gender norms interrelate to shape these choices. Constitutional decisions in the 1970s ended legal distinctions between the duties of husbands and wives but left largely in place both gender norms and substantive rights within marriage, tax, and benefits law that encourage specialization into breadwinning and caregiving roles. By permitting disaggregation of the marriage equation, the new reality of same-sex marriage can serve as a natural experiment that should inform both study design and policy reform. Key Points for the Family Court Community:• This article shows that although marriage law no longer explicitly requires wives to provide domestic support and husbands to provide economic support, non-sex-specific aspects of the substantive law continue to encourage couples to specialize into breadwinning and caregiving rules.• Same-sex marriage can serve as a natural experiment to expose the extent to which substantive marriage law-as opposed to gender norms-may encourage couples to specialize into breadwinning and caregiving roles.• Research on same-sex marriage can help inform how best to achieve equality within all marriages and what is fair compensation for a dependent spouse in the event of a divorce.

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Once upon a time, not very long ago, there were more states where a same-sex couple could enter into a civil union or domestic partnership than states where they could marry. 1 In the wake of United States v. Windsor, 2 the federal government has largely ended its discriminatory policy of denying recognition to 1. In July 2011, nine states, plus the District of Columbia, permitted same-sex couples to form civil unions or domestic partnerships that provided full or virtually full state-level spousal rights, while only six states, plus the District of Columbia, permitted same-sex couples to marry; at that time, there were three additional states that had created alternative statuses that provided partial spousal rights. See Marriage Equality & Other Relationship Recognition Laws, Hum. rts. campaIgn (July 6, 2011), http://www.hrc.org/state_maps (on file with author). Analysis of data from the 2010 census suggests that, at that time, there were approximately 220,000 same-sex couples in formal legal relationships, split almost evenly between those who were married and those who were in civil unions or domestic partnerships.

Congressional overrides of prior judicial interpretations of statutory language are typically defined as equivalent to judicial overrulings, and they are presumed to play a central role in maintaining legislative supremacy. Our study is the first to empirically test these assumptions.Using a differences-in-differences research design, we find that citation levels decrease far less after legislative overrides than after judicial overrulings. This pattern holds true even when controlling for depth of the superseding event or considering only the specific proposition that was superseded. Moreover, contrary to what one might expect, citation levels decrease more quickly after restorative overrides-in which Congress repudiates the prior Supreme Court decision as incorrect-than after overrides intended to update or clarify the law. This suggests that ongoing citation of overridden precedents, what we call shadow precedents, may be driven more by information failure or ambiguity than by ideological disagreements between the branches of government.

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