Legally Married

Scot Peterson is the Bingham Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies at Balliol and in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University. A former attorney, he practiced law in the United States before coming to Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in politics in 2009. He teaches British politics, comparative government and US politics at Oxford, where he specializes in constitutional theory and history. He has written extensively on church-state relations in the US and the UK. Iain McLean is Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford, and Professor of Politics, University of Oxford. He is the author of more than 100 papers and 15 books. Iain was born in Edinburgh and educated at the Royal High School and Oxford University. He has worked in Newcastle, (where he was also a county councillor), Warwick, and Oxford and held various visiting professorships overseas. He has been studying devolution and Scottish independence since his postgraduate dissertation on the SNP. He is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Unlike the other little boys who watched the trains go under Blackford Road bridge, he became an engine-driver (on a narrow-gauge steam railway in Wales). He has co-authored two policy explainer books for Edinburgh University Press: Scotland's Choices: The Referendum and What Happens Afterwards and Legally Married: Love and Law in the UK and the US.

Legally Married is … as useful to specialists in law as to Christians trying to make sense of the issue … Peterson and McLean offer bracing realism rather than wishful thinking as a basis for thinking through contemporary issues [It deserves] a wide readership both inside and outside the Churches.

• Preface; Introduction: Changing Attitudes; 1. Different Theories of Marriage; 2. Marriage from the Reformation to the Rules of the Fleet; 3. From Lord Hardwicke’s Act to Civil Marriage and Divorce; 4. Marriage Across the Seas: Ireland, South Africa, Canada and the United States; 5. Current Policy Questions: Fighting Fair about Same-sex Marriage; 6. Unfolding Developments; Bibliography; Index.