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by sjwright
4036 days ago
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We are absolutely talking about the current legal landscape. If you want to discuss polygamy in a spherical cow universe, that's fine, and I've already said I have no in-principle objection to formalizing polygamy. However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism. It has more moving parts and more complicated parts. Most critically, its interfaces to the outside world are different. It would require substantial root-and-branch changes to a massive amount of existing legislation in every country and state. Using a different word in law (while accepting colloquial use of the word marriage in everyday parlance) is a practical necessity. |
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Forming, adding to, withdrawing from, dissolving, and otherwise handling unions of three or more people, including in dealing with how the members of the union deal with their rights and powers vis-a-vis the property and prerogatives of the union as such between each other and in interfacing with outside entities has been dealt with fairly extensively over the past several centuries in the evolution of partnership law. And most of it can be viewed as a fairly direct multiparty generalization of the two party way similar things are dealt with in existing marriage.
There's no real reason that a generalization of marriage law to handle multiparty relationships that reduced naturally to the same handling for two-party cases as status quo rules would deserve any different name.