Prenuptial agreements – also referred to as “premarital agreements” in Texas – are a curious thing in the context of marriage. On the one hand, many people insist that these agreements are necessary to ensure that no spouse is unfairly impacted by a divorce. On the other hand, prenuptial agreements are not exactly the most romantic things, and in some ways seem incongruous with the general purpose of marriage to begin with. The best approach is likely to be somewhere in the middle: use prenups when necessary, but they may not always be necessary. Texas is a community property state, which has a decisive role in property division in divorces without a prenuptial agreement. If a couple feels that this default position is fine, then perhaps a prenup is simply not necessary.
In this post, we’d like to give a basic overview of how courts treat prenuptial agreements. Most readers have at least a general idea of how these agreements work. A prenuptial agreement is a contract which predetermines things such as property division, asset protection, inheritance, debt responsibility, and so forth. But how do courts treat these agreements? Let’s discuss in a bit of detail.
Texas Courts Apply Basic Contract Law Principles to Agreements
Chapter 4 of Subtitle (1)(B) within the Texas Family Code deals with both premarital and marital property agreements. This is where we can find the specific rules which govern prenuptial agreements. When it comes to the enforcement of these agreements, if we look at the code, we can see that Texas courts apply many of the basic principles of contract law. This means, for instance, that prenuptial agreements must be entered into voluntarily in order to be upheld. This is taken right from basic contract law which states that there must be a valid “acceptance” to create a contract.
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