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View the RCW Project Table of Statutes (may load slowly)
The RCW Project is an attempt to identify those Washington statutes that grant rights or impose obligations dependent upon marital status. The original analysis, performed in 1997, included 360 such statutes. Since then, some have been repealed and many more have been added. Better software and improved search techniques have also uncovered a number of statutes that were omitted from the original analysis. The RCW Project 2004 found 423 such statutes, all of which are listed and briefly described in the attached table. The purpose of this summary is to describe some of the salient points identified in the study. Both the table and the summary should be used as they were intended: as a brief and simplified index to an enormous body of law. Because the statutes will continue to change, because many statutes have interpretive glosses imposed by regulators and the courts (which glosses are outside of the scope of the present phase of this study), and because the author has no special expertise in most of the diverse fields of law surveyed, this table should not be relied on by anyone seeking legal advice with regard to the topics covered. Such advice should come from lawyers engaged for that purpose and should involve review of the actual, current text of the statutes involved.
It should come as no surprise that the legislature has chosen to grant a number of very important benefits to married persons. Among these are: (1) the right to bring a wrongful death action (RCW 4.20); (2) a grant of spousal privilege (the right and duty not to testify against a spouse in most legal proceedings) (RCW 5.60.060); (3) inheritance rights, whether under the laws of intestacy (when someone dies without a will) (RCW 11.04), or overriding certain elections by those who have made wills (RCW 11.28); (4) the right to dissolution of the relationship and distribution of assets administered by a specialized court system (RCW 26.09); (5) community property (RCW 26.16); (6) protections for those who receive insurance benefits through their spouse (RCW 48.44); (7) rights on the death of a spouse, including the right to control autopsies and organ donations and the right to be buried next to one's spouse (RCW 68.32); and (8) certain state tax benefits, such as a sales tax exemption for transfers made from one spouse to another in connection with a dissolution (RCW 82.45).
Other benefits, while not as important to the public at large, may be critical for certain classes of people. For example, spouses of public employees, including teachers, state patrol, police, firefighters, judges, and other civil servants have important pension benefits. Certain business licenses, including insurance agent licenses (RCW 48.17), liquor licenses (RCW 66.24), and various fishing licenses (including those for whiting, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers) (RCW 77.65-77.70), and gas station franchises (RCW 19.120) pass automatically and without charge to the surviving spouses of licensees or franchisees. The spouses of indigent veterans are entitled to various forms of public assistance (RCW 73.04). The spouses of graduate students at public universities are entitled to have their health insurance benefits paid (RCW 28B.10).
What is often overlooked is the degree to which marriage also imposes significant burdens on one or both of the parties. There are at least three ways that this happens.
First and foremost, many statutes fix rights between the married persons in a way that by definition benefits one spouse and burdens the other. The laws governing community property are one obvious example of this phenomenon: each spouse is given certain rights to property that would otherwise belong solely to the other, and the net result of this reallocation helps one spouse at the expense of the other when the community property becomes separate, either on dissolution or death. Other examples include the numerous decisions that one spouse cannot make without the consent of the other, such as elections of the form in which one will receive pension benefits.
A second set of burdens resembles the "marriage penalty" that is often discussed in connection with the federal income tax. On any number of statutes in which the income of those covered is important, there are different scales for married people and single people, and the scales for married people are not the same as the sum of those for two single people. These include rules governing garnishment (RCW 6.15), eligibility for a subsidy in the state Basic Health Plan (RCW 70.47), and eligibility for senior citizen campsite rental discounts (RCW 79A.05). In addition, a surprisingly large number of statutes impose a "remarriage penalty": rights held by a surviving spouse based on one marriage may be lost if the surviving spouse chooses to remarry. These include pension benefits for surviving spouses of many public employees (RCW 2.10, 2.12, 41.18, 41.20, 41.24, 41.32, and 41.44) and the right to special license plates for the spouses of Pearl Harbor survivors (RCW 46.16.305) and free license plates for the surviving spouses of prisoners of war (RCW 73.04).
A third category of burdens on married persons involves attempts by the legislature to protect the public from fraud or nepotism. Among such statutes are those requiring that public members of various professional licensing boards not be married to members of the regulated profession (e.g. RCW 18.118.020), forbidding spouses of lottery employees or officials from participating in the state lottery (RCW 67.70.180), and requiring professional fundraisers to make a disclosure if he or she is married to an officer of an entity that will receive 10% or more of the fundraising proceeds (RCW 19.09.097).
It should not be forgotten that many other benefits and burdens are tied to federal law (over 1100, according to a recent GAO study) and as such are outside of the scope of this study. These include immigration and tax laws, social security and veterans' benefits, civil and military service benefits, bankruptcy protections, and various employment benefits.
* The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Josh Gaul, Sara Lingafelter, Aaron Ostrovsky and Alex Wagner in updating the RCW Project in 2004.
RCW Project Table of Washington State Marriage Statutes—HTML
RCW Project Table of Washington State Marriage Statutes—EXCEL (Click on this link to open in Microsoft Excel. Right-click and select "Save Target As" to save on your computer.)
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