From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

We're revisiting a conversation with Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU and leading expert on the regulation of sex and sexuality.

She's also the author of numerous articles, including Marriage as Punishment.

We discussed the legal institution of marriage and considered the victories and setbacks in the fight for marriage

and non-marriage equality. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Professor Murray, welcome to the

podcast. Thanks for having me. A lot of your scholarship revolves around the issue of marriage under the law.

And marriage, as we know, means many different things to many different people.

So I wonder if you can just start us off by giving us a working definition of marriage as a legal construct.

So marriage is a legal construct typically refers to the joining of two people in a union that is recognized

by the state. And so that's a critical portion. And it distinguishes civil marriage from,

for example, religious marriage in that the state recognition of the union is paramount. So

individuals can be married for religious purposes, but the idea of

civil marriage is really about the state recognizing you as a unit. And the state will regulate

your entry into civil marriage, and it can regulate your exit from it, so the laws of divorce

and whatnot. And that's basically the working definition.

It's pretty straightforward.

And what types of benefits and responsibilities come along with marriage?

So the responsibilities are quite significant.

Historically, spouses were understood to have certain reciprocal obligations.

The wife's legal identity upon marriage was

merged into her husband under whose protection wing and cover she did everything. So the husband was

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