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Home / Law and Society / Renee Cochard – Unmarried Cohabitants’ Property Entitlements: A Gendered Approach

Renee Cochard – Unmarried Cohabitants’ Property Entitlements: A Gendered Approach

April 11, 2014


Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the UBC Faculty of Law. Until the late seventies/early eighties, women who were separating from their spouses had no right to claim property acquired during marriage unless it was registered in their names. The SCC decision of Murdoch v. Murdoch rendered in 1975 exposed the inequalities of the law. Beginning in the late seventies provincial governments began passing matrimonial property legislation which allowed for equal division of marital property. The legislation only applied to married persons and unmarried persons were left to apply for division of property under the equitable rules of trust, a complicated and costly process. In 2001 a challenge by Susan Welsh to the NS Matrimonial Property Act came before the SCC. In a surprising decision, the SCC held that excluding unmarried cohabitants from Matrimonial Legislation did not contravene section 15 of the Charter. Despite that ruling several provinces have revised their property legislation to include unmarried persons but the vast majority of unmarried Canadians are not protected. This exclusion has a gendered perspective and affects women and children to a much larger extent.

Speaker Bio: Renee R. Cochard, a family law lawyer from Alberta, has practiced exclusively Family Law since being admitted to the bar in 1979. She has an LLM from York U in Alternative Dispute Resolution (2003) and is presently a PHD Candidate in Law at UBC.


Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library

Singer, J. W., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2000). Entitlement: The paradoxes of property. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Link]

Paul, J. (1990). PROPERTY, ENTITLEMENT, AND REMEDY. The Monist, 73(4), 564-577. [Link]

Smith, H. E. (2007). Intellectual property as property: Delineating entitlements in information. The Yale Law Journal, 116(8), 1742-1822. [Link]

Brigham, J. (1990). Property and the politics of entitlement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.


UBC Library Research Guides

Family Law

Gender Studies

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