Also known as: adulterer · adulteress · adulterine · adulterini · adulterium · infidelity · extramarital · adulterous
Written by attorneys · grounded in primary & secondary sources — see below
Voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone other than the person's spouse.
Arthur Abrams returned home early and found his wife in bed with another man. He immediately seized a nearby object and struck the man. The discovery of adultery supplied adequate provocation that reduced what would otherwise have been murder to voluntary manslaughter.
Abigail Alvarez and Alan Ackerman lived together for several years under an oral agreement to pool earnings and share property. When they separated, Alan sought to enforce the agreement. The court enforced the contract because the agreement was not inseparably founded on sexual services.
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Anthony Arnold obtained a legislative divorce from his wife after she alleged his criminal intimacies with others. The decree was upheld against constitutional challenge even though it altered the marital status of the parties.
Andre Antoine transported a woman across state lines for an adulterous relationship. The woman consented but was not charged. The Court held that her consent did not make her a conspirator under the Mann Act.
Angela Acosta and her husband used contraceptives in violation of a state statute. The Court struck down the statute because it intruded on the privacy of the marital relationship even though the state retained power to prohibit adultery.
A colonial statute listed adultery among capital crimes. The Court later examined the statute's historical context when reviewing the constitutionality of the death penalty for other offenses.
Adultery was not a common-law crime in England. It was punished by the church as an ecclesiastical offense and later criminalized by statute in some American jurisdictions.
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Catching one's spouse in the act of adultery qualifies as adequate provocation at common law. The discovery must actually inflame the defendant and occur before a reasonable cooling-off period has elapsed.
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In fault-based divorce jurisdictions, proof of adultery may reduce the offending spouse's share of marital property. Courts also consider the effect of the conduct on children when awarding custody.
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Consent or conduct showing willingness for the spouse to have adulterous relations bars the consenting spouse from recovering damages for harm to marital interests.
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…It says that preventing the use of birth-control devices by married persons helps prevent the indulgence by some in such extramarital relations. The rationality of this justification is dubious, particularly in light of the admitted widespread availability to all persons in the State of Connecticut, unmarried as well as…