Connubial Fictions

Jonathan S. Masur is John P. Wilson Professor of Law; the Director of the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Program in Behavioral Law, Finance and Economics; and the David and Celia Hilliard Research Scholar, all at the University of Chicago Law School. He received a BS in physics and an AB in political science from Stanford University and his JD from Harvard Law School. Masur is the co-author of Happiness and the Law (2015) and co-editor of Cannons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America's Wars (2021). Richard H. McAdams is Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of The Expressive Powers of Law (2015), and co-editor of Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (2017) and Fairness in Law and Economics (2013). His poetry has been published in Cream City Review and The Literary Nest. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, in the LawSchool and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author or co-author of over 500 articles and twenty-six books, including most recently The Republic of Love: Opera, Breath, and Freedom (2026) and The Tenderness of Silent Minds: Benjamin Britten and His War Requiem (2024). Nussbaum has received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2016), the Holberg Prize (2021), and the Balzan Prize (2022).

• Part I. The Promise of Marriage Chapter 1 Lee Anne Fennell, Owning Marriage in Robinsonâs Gilead Novels: Chapter 2: Saul Levmore, Investments in The Magnificent Ambersons: Business, Marriage, and Lawmaking Part II. Same-Sex Marriage Chapter 3: David M. Halperin and Roger Mathew Grant, Marriage and the Fate of Queer Aesthetics Chapter 4: Martha C. Nussbaum, "A Kind of Painful Progress": Angels in America and the Possibility of Truth in Marriage Part III. Culture and Marriage Chapter 5: Seebany Datta-Barua and Jonathan S. Masur, United States: Marriage, Immigration, and Love in Indian American Literature Chapter 6: Malavika Parthasarathy, What Makes an "American" Marriage? Narratives of Immigration and Naturalization in The Namesake Chapter 7: Richard H. McAdams, Who's Afraid of Childless Marriage? Part IV. Interracial Marriage Chapter 8: Randall L. Kennedy, James Alan McPherson on Interracial Intimacy Including Marriage Chapter 9: Alison L. LaCroix, "What Right Has Public Opinion to Interfere with Our Marriage Relations?": Interracial Union, the Civil War, and Memory in the Fiction of Frances E. W. Harper Chapter 10: Farah Peterson, Alone with Kindred Part V. Marriage and Divorce Chapter 11: Hendrik A. Hartog, Man and Wife, in Madison, in the 1980s Chapter 12: Laura Weinrib, Beyond the Best Interests of Billy Kramer: Law, Psychoanalysis, and the Divorce Revolution Chapter 13: Matthew Zipf, Equality as a Feint: Philip Roth and Alimony Law