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On April 1, 2003, the North Dakota state Senate voted 26–21 to keep the 113-year-old state law against male-female cohabitation, which outlawed the practice and carried a penalty of up to 30 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. At the time, North Dakota's most recent census showed 11,000 unmarried couples of all genders.
Several states have a cohabitation clause, including cohabitation within the state as a criterion for the crime. For people who have entered a polygamous marriage outside the state, such clause makes it possible to be punished again if they move to the state and cohabit, but on the other hand it can protect them if they only visit the state ...
As of December 2023, cohabitation of unmarried couples remains illegal in two states (Mississippi and North Carolina), [122] while as of 2023 fornication remains illegal in two states (Georgia [123] and South Carolina [124]). These laws are almost never enforced and are now believed to be unconstitutional since the legal decision Lawrence v.
The United States is one of few industrialized countries to have laws criminalizing adultery. [80] In the United States, laws vary from state to state. Until the mid-20th century, most U.S. states (especially Southern and Northeastern states) had laws against fornication, adultery or cohabitation. These laws have gradually been abolished or ...
Because polygamy has been illegal throughout the United States since the mid-19th century, and because it was illegal in many individual states before that period of time, sources on alternative marriage practices are limited. Consequently, it is difficult to get a clear picture of the extent of the practice both in the past and the present.
1 Some states recognize marriages performed elsewhere, while other states do not. The legal status of first cousin marriage varies considerably from one U.S. state to another, ranging from being legal in some states to being a criminal offense in others. It is illegal or largely illegal in 32 states and legal or largely legal in 18.
In the United States, common-law marriage, also known as sui juris marriage, informal marriage, marriage by habit and repute, or marriage in fact is a form of irregular marriage that survives only in seven U.S. states and the District of Columbia along with some provisions of military law; plus two other states that recognize domestic common law marriage after the fact for limited purposes.
McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184 (1964), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a cohabitation law of Florida, part of the state's anti-miscegenation laws, was unconstitutional. [1] The law prohibited habitual cohabitation by two unmarried people of opposite sex, if one was black and the other was white.