Let’s say there’s a scenario where a young man of low social standing is unhappy with his life and steals the identity of another person he knows who has died who is further up the social food chain, and has no relatives.
Time passes, he goes about his life, becomes very successful and even moderately wealthy. He marries, and after some time his wife discovers his real identity, and decides to divorce him for forcing her to live a lie. They have no children.
If he married her under false pretenses is the marriage valid? Could he unilaterally annul the marriage by claiming they were never married and not owe her alimony? Obviously he would still be liable for prosecution for identity theft.
The innocent spouse would probably find recourse under a state’s “putative spouse” statute if there was one. These statutes/doctrines state that, basically, if a party entered into a marriage in good faith and didn’t know of the defect in the technicalities in the marriage, they are to be considered “married” by the court for the purposes of fairness.
If not, you would probably just have to rely on the court’s inherent powers of equity to do the innocent party justice. It’s really state specific, though.
Most common law jurisdictions recognize a distinction between marriage void ab initio (Latin for “from the get go” ) and voidable.
A void marriage is one that never existed, because of a fundamental impediement. For example, if one of the partners had a still-living, never-divorced spouse, that partner had no capacity to enter into a second marriage, so that marriage would be void.
The other category, voidable, is tricky. It deals with situations where there was an impediment of some sort, but not a fundamental one. In those cases, one of the partners can apply to the courts to have the marriage declared void. However, it’s against public policy to allow a person to benefit from their own misconduct in these sorts of situations, so if the party knew about the impediment, that party can’t later use it as the basis to apply to have the marriage declared void; only the partner who didn’t know about the impediment has that right.
That’s just a short summary, and it can get very complicated depending on the court rulings and any statutory provisions in a particular jurisdiction. But in the hypothetical situation set out by the OP, I don’t think that the person who assumed the false identity could apply to have the marriage voided - if identity is the basis for declaring a marriage void in a particular jurisdiction, I think it’s usually the basis for a voidable argument, not a void argument. But Family Law 200 is a long ways away…
What they – esp. Piper – said. Except also, in the U.S., this would be an issue of state law, so the precise answer might differ depending on where the case is heard. In particular, different states may draw the line between voidable and void ab initio differently. So in a state (prob. most) where, as Piper says, the issue of identity makes a voidable marriage, only the innocent spouse would be able to use it to get an annulment. But if a state were to consider it void ab initio, then the non-innocent spouse could get the same effect just by making it known – because with void marriages, there’s no getting around it, it’s an illegal marriage regardless of the preference of the parties. I wouldn’t expect any state that considers mere fictional name to make a marriage void ab in (but who knows?) – however, if you change the hypo such that the devious spouse is using the fake name because he abandoned a previous, still-living wife, or he knows he’s a close blood relative of the bride, that would do it.
) and voidable.