I recently attended Boston’s largest science fiction convention, Arisia.  As I’ve been doing for the last few years, I was a panelist.  I spoke on a fairly wide variety of topics, usually playing the role of the legal expert.  Science Fiction conventions are a great area to come up with speculative legal situations and really stretch and apply the current law to new and unusual situations.  One of the big questions I came across was a question about plural marriage.

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There are a number of science fiction and fantasy authors who write in settings where plural marriage is accepted if not the norm.  Some of these authors are very well-known and respected in the field, including Robert Heinlein.  As a result, there is a well-developed body of speculative work on how such arrangements might work.

Someone posed a question to me about the most likely way that a plural marriage law would handle the exponential increase in relationships to manage from a legal perspective.  In a 2-person marriage, there is one relationship to manage.  But in a 3-person marriage, there are 3 relationships to manage, 4-person marriages have 6 relationships to manage, etc.

So the question boils down to this: If A marries B, and B marries C, what is the legal relationship between A and C?  The short answer is that it depends on what model of plural marriage is being employed.  There are models of plural marriage that state that there is no relationship between A and C.  If A and C want to be married, they need to be married in a separate ceremony. Another model requires that for C to enter into A & B’s marriage, they must both consent to be married to C.  In this scenario, there is one marriage, and A, B, and C are all co-equal members of the marriage.

So I was left asking myself what model would be the most likely to develop under American law.  In a flash of inspiration, I realized that the default rules for forming corporations and business partnerships deal with many of these questions already.

Business organizations law (”biz org” for those of us in the know) has the potential to really influence any potential plural marriage laws that could arise.  The common law of business entities was formed for this very purpose: handling the assets and liabilities of multiple people jointly when those people are working together for a common purpose.

The answer to this question in a general business partnership is simple.  The partnership holds all members of the relationship together.  The plural marriage creates relationships among all the parties.  So, using the business organizations model, there would be one marriage, that initially contained A and B, and after the second marriage, contains A, B, and C.  Naturally, this raises questions about whether A needs to explicitly consent to B’s marriage of C, or if the married is implied by B’s marriage to C and A’s lack of action.  More on this later.

Divorce would work very similarly in both the business and marriage models.  One party would file a petition with the court to dissolve the partnership or marriage.  After a hearing on the merits and some discovery regarding the assets of the marriage or business, and the court will divide the assets between the entities breaking away.

So what would be different from biz org?  First off, many states have reformed their marriage laws to eliminate “common law marriage”.  However, these states almost uniformly allow “common law partnerships” for for-profit ventures.  It is highly unlikely that states that have eliminated common law marriages would bring it back for plural marriages simply because their model allows for it.  Given the partnership paradigm for these relationships, it is unlikely that B could ever actually marry C without A’s explicit consent.

Another major difference between biz org rules and any reasonable plural marriage law is children.  In Massachusetts, as is the case in many other states, there is an irrefutable presumption that a parent (usually the father) is the legal parent of the children born to the marriage.  But we know in the case of a plural marriage that this is not the case.

Biz org law gives us no guidance on this point.  Children are rarely ever the byproduct or direct object of a business transaction, so the law never evolved to tell businesses what they should do with them.  Family law would probably be the sole controlling body of law capable of dealing with a custody situation in this circumstance, and given the current illegality of plural marriage, case law on point is probably very rare.

So to answer the question I was posed, I suspect any move towards legalizing plural marriage would likely draw from corporate law, since it already handles issues with multiple partners pretty well.  The marriage would be the legal entity separate from its members, with people coming in and out based on the general rules laid out by the existing members of the marriage.