LATs and the Law as It Now Stands

Courts have in fact encountered cases involving LATs, primarily in the context of contests about whether alimony to a previous spouse should be terminated based on cohabitation. In these cases, judges have been devising a series of tests for determining whether a couple is in fact cohabiting or living apart together. This chapter will describe those cases, in the course of which the lives of LAT couples are revealed in more detail. In the absence of any consistent legal treatment, obvious injustices result, such as the denial of palimony suits and terminating alimony set after a long marriage based on a woman’s subsequent LAT relationship, although it involves no financial interdependence at all.