08/23/2026
In most of America, if your marriage turns out to be legally void, you were never married. Louisiana refuses to say that. ⚜️
The doctrine is called putative marriage, and it comes to us from the old Roman and canon law that runs underneath the Louisiana Civil Code. Here is what it does.
Imagine a woman marries a man in good faith. Church, license, witnesses, the whole thing. Years pass. Children are born. A house is bought. Then something surfaces. Maybe an earlier marriage of his was never actually dissolved. Maybe a divorce decree from another state was defective. Whatever the reason, the marriage was legally null from the very first day. It never existed.
In a common law state, that can be brutal. No marriage means no marital property rights, and a spouse who spent twenty years building a household can find she has no legal claim to any of it.
Louisiana looks at the same situation and asks one question instead. Did she believe in good faith that she was married?
If the answer is yes, our law gives her the civil effects of marriage anyway. She is a putative spouse. She has community property rights. She can inherit. The children are legitimate. The law essentially says that a person who lived an honest married life is not going to be stripped of it because of a defect she never knew about and did not cause.
And the code goes further than most people expect. If two women both married the same man in good faith, both can be putative spouses, and the estate can be divided among them. Louisiana courts have actually done this.
Think about the philosophy in that. Most legal systems ask what the paperwork says. Louisiana asks what the person believed and how they lived. It protects the innocent party rather than the technicality.
We inherited this from France and Spain and Rome, and we kept it while forty nine other states went another way.
Everywhere else the law can tell a widow her whole life was a clerical error. Here, it cannot. 🕯️
