PALIMONY: RECOGNITION OF WOMEN’S RIGHT FOR MAINTENANCE IN LIVE-IN RELATIONSHIPS
Downloads
Abstract
The Supreme Court of India has since the year 2010 delivered judgments granting maintenance to partners in a live-in relationship, if their relationship passes the litmus test of the guidelines laid down by the Hon’ble Court in a catena of cases. Besides the apex court, the Law Commission of India, National Commission for Women and the Malimath Committee have all endorsed the concept of granting maintenance or ‘palimony’ to the aggrieved partner of a live-in relationship. In spite of such progressive strides taken by the aforementioned authorities, the parliament has refrained from framing any statutes that would work towards the regulation of live-in relationships. This has given rise to an extremely undesirable scenario where increasingly plural fractions of the society, namely the unmarried domestic partners, are not being accounted for and governed by explicit statutes. It is submitted that the welfare of these citizens cannot be left at the mercy of judicial interpretations any longer. The promulgation of the concept of palimony in India is not only in conformity with the modern relationship trends but also with the spirit of the Constitution of India which is secular to its very core and takes a stand for a Uniform Civil Code. The present paper aims to bring to the fore the various cases adjudicated upon by the Courts in the matter of granting maintenance to partners of live-in relationships and furnish the paucity of information regarding the concept of palimony in India.
External References to this Article
Loading reference data...
Readership Data
Refreshing Cached Analytics Data
The cached analytics data has become stale and journal.thelawbrigade.com is making a fresh request to fetch the latest data from Google Analytics. This may take 20-30 seconds depending on the server response time from Google Analytics. Please do not close the browser during this time. We appreciate your patience.
License Terms
Ownership and Licensing:
Authors of research papers submitted to any journal published by The Law Brigade Publishers retain the copyright of their work while granting the journal specific rights. Authors maintain ownership of the copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication. Simultaneously, authors agree to license their research papers under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.
License Permissions:
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License, others are permitted to share and adapt the work, even for commercial purposes, provided that appropriate attribution is given to the authors, and acknowledgment is made of the initial publication by The Law Brigade Publishers. This license encourages the broad dissemination and reuse of research papers while ensuring that the original work is properly credited.
Additional Distribution Arrangements:
Authors are free to enter into separate, non-exclusive contractual arrangements for distributing the published version of the work (e.g., posting it to institutional repositories or publishing it in books), provided that the original publication by The Law Brigade Publishers is acknowledged.
Online Posting:
Authors are encouraged to share their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on personal websites) both prior to submission and after publication. This practice can facilitate productive exchanges and increase the visibility and citation of the work.
Responsibility and Liability:
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their submitted research papers do not infringe on the copyright, privacy, or other rights of third parties. The Law Brigade Publishers disclaims any liability for any copyright infringement or violation of third-party rights within the submitted research papers.
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright © 2026 by Gaurav Chandra
The copyright and license terms mentioned on this page take precedence over any other license terms mentioned on the article full text PDF or any other material associated with the article.
