We often talk about spousal maintenance, perhaps more correctly we should talk about former-spousal maintenance or ex-spousal maintenance. But it is not often that lawyers stop to ask themselves why spousal maintenance is paid at all. Why, after the dissolution of a marriage, does the law permit, and indeed order, one spouse financially to maintain the other? Well, it is an effect of the common law duty imposed upon spouses to support each other whilst the marriage subsists. That duty continues after separation as a result of statute. Even before judicial divorce first became law in this country (in 1857),…
