Relational Justice and Family Agreements

Premarital agreements have always been controversial, and the change to much greater enforceability has not much changed their reception. Many of the criticisms premarital agreements evoke seem connected to the concerns Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman raise in their book, Relational Justice. That book’s emphasis on our obligation of relational justice to those with whom we interact and transact goes a long way to explaining many of the current doctrinal constraints on premarital agreements. One question this article investigates is whether significantly one-sided substantive terms in such agreements might nonetheless be consistent with both relational justice and general family law policy.