In an era when relations between men and women are governed by the principles of equality and liberty, we may ask whether it is appropriate to preserve a post-divorce support entitlement between spouses, and what justification there is for doing so. European legislation is not very forthcoming in this regard, and this means that looking for the justification for entitlement to an allowance to compensate for financial disparities calls for a tool to be developed first that would identify that justification. After testing a two-option model in which the traditional support and compensation functions of a post-divorce financial allowance were contrasted and finding that this model did not provide a useful comparison between the selected European legal systems, a second, three-option model was developed and applied to those systems. The second model distinguishes the support, compensation and insurance justifications and can identify more pronounced differences. However, this does not mean that there are any noteworthy differences among the various post-divorce allowances in terms of the amounts awarded.

In 1975, as part of a complete reform of divorce law, France eliminated traditional spousal support awards in favour of payment of a “compensatory allowance.” French law thus went counter to the solutions adopted by most European legal systems, which held with maintaining a support obligation between former spouses as the expression of a duty to assist that continues beyond the divorce.

This analysis examines that innovation and the debate it generated among French parliamentarians and the legal community alike, identifying the justifications advanced by the actors in the French legal system for post-divorce financial compensation itself. We see that in spite of the innovation sought, there is no consensus on the question of the basis for financial compensation after divorce. In the most recent period, however, there has been more openness to remedying inequality associated with differences in the spouses’ investments in household activities.

This article consists of a wide-ranging review of the international empirical literature, the aim being to show the extent to which there is an empirical (statistical) basis for payment of a compensatory allowance between former spouses after divorce. Two factors are primarily examined in light of that literature: first, the fact that the allowance is conditional on inequality between the standards of living enjoyed by the former spouses at the time of the divorce, and second, the fact that regard can be had to the previous occupational choices of the former spouses in calculating the allowance. Our analysis shows that while the empirical literature is in relatively broad agreement on the question of inequality in the standard of living, the empirical justification for the connection between compensation and previous occupational choices, on the other hand, is considerably less widely recognized.

In the early 1990s, a number of American legal thinkers began to question the justification for retaining a support obligation between former spouses when they divorced, in a society where adultery is no longer penalized in divorce law and women have become more financially autonomous. They found the answers in economic analysis. This article examines the two main approaches that drew the attention of legal writers. The first derives from the economy of the family and is based on the principle of efficiency. The second draws on the economy of contracts and is concerned with the nature of the relationship between the spouses. This attention to economic analysis is novel, from the European standpoint, because we see no evidence of that approach in the European literature dealing with the legal treatment of the economic inequalities between former spouses at the time of divorce.

One method of compensating for economic inequality between spouses at the time of divorce is to award a sum of money, paid monthly over a varying period of time or paid in a lump sum. The criteria for awarding an allowance are comparable in all of the European countries analyzed. The end result of the generality of those criteria is that the principle and amount of the allowance rest largely on the discretion of the judge.

Given the uncertainty that this discretion entails, there have not necessarily been any scales or guidelines developed at the initiative of the authorities with the objective of assisting judges and parties in doing this assessment. However, calculation methods have arisen whose sources and rationales cover a very wide range. The article proposes to produce a review of these various methods and to consider, in the case of France, the rationales they advance.

This article will explore data obtained through interviews with UK family law practitioners and clients with experience of financial relief on formalised same-sex relationship breakdown. It will focus on questions around how solicitors have approached and argued their dissolution cases (and the extent to which they have drawn upon heteronormative arguments and case law), and whether both they and the clients believed that civil partnerships are, and should be, treated similarly to marriages. The discussion will examine the different understandings of ‘equality’ employed, and question the ways that the participants relied on ideas of sameness and difference. It will be argued that the solicitors placed particular stress on sameness, and that heteronormative constructs of gendered inequalities have been transplanted into same-sex cases, in a system where practitioners’ submissions are based on ‘what works.’ This is despite the fact that lesbian and gay couples do not map onto the ‘template’ under which the parties have been subjected to different gendered expectations. Conversely, the clients were less willing to take on the full legal implications associated with (heterosexual) marital breakdown and less receptive of the solicitors ‘translating’ their matters to pigeonhole them into the existing framework.

Family policies in France and various European countries, like pension schemes, involve mechanisms to compensate for inequality between women and men associated with the organization of the family. The compensation is sometimes tied directly to the marriage, or more broadly to the couple, and sometimes to parental investment and time devoted to the maintenance and welfare of family members. In this article, we examine the principles of compensation applied in the legislation of five European countries characterized by different social protection systems. We use the concept of familialization to characterize the rationales underlying women’s social rights in different systems, and to understand their processes by connecting the developments in family/social policies with the dual process of de-familialization of parental activities and de-specialization of gender roles.