• I don't understand what this means. Under English law all extramarital intercourse was criminal, but the jurisdiction lay with the courts Christian. Enforcing public penance was a meaningful sanction in traditional face-to-face society. Perhaps I don't understand what morality you think the law did or didn't underwrite.

I have no crisis, my measures are not without criticism. I also fundamentally disagree with treating marriage as a means to acrue property and maybe that is the property. Without changes in the law I cannot test whether social benefit will come from. I might go so far as to say that marriage cannot succeed as a contract and a means to acrue property. A propertarian theory of marriage is at odds with a contractarian one. One grants equitable relief and one damages.

• Some of these sentences need rewriting. The meaning of the first isn't clear, while the second and the third appear unfinished. I don't understand what the last two mean: your distinctions between property and contract don't make sense to me, so perhaps a sentence or two of clarification would help. You can shorten by some fifty words elsewhere to get room for that degree of explanation.

• You can be as idealistic as you like, but surely you can't ask society as a whole to ignore significant social injustice in order to maintain idealism? If some spouses are confiscating property belonging to other spouses at the dissolution of marriage, we need to accept (1) that marriages do dissolve; and (2) that when they do, legal intervention to prevent misappropriation will be necessary.

While the stated purpose of alimony may be the redistribution of property, if I’m allowed to use Moglen’s logic then money being fungible makes alimony equivalent to punitive damages, just a difference name. .

• That didn't follow at all. In saying that "money is fungible" I mean with reference to the household economy: if a household gets a certain payment every month from a former spouse, whether that payment is labeled "alimony" or "child support" is likely to have no effect on how that money is spent. How you get from that point to this one is completely obscure.

To require one party to continue performance via financial support and not require the other to continue performance via whatever non-monetary means is askew. Alimony gathers support from a proposition that it is unjust to leave one spouse without means to support themselves. This is patronizing to say the least. Marriage as a contract means different things for those that enter, but the idea that a party contracts take care of the other spouse outside the terms of the contract is wrong. If one party does not work during the course of the marriage, there is a high degree of risk involved. However, there is a larger risk in choosing to contract to marriage at all. Alimony does not take away from the opportunity lost through choosing marriage, it just imposes unequal performance on parties post bad decisions.