united-states california marriage jury personal-information
How can one not know their own legal marital status?
<p>I saw this screenshot floating around for a California jury duty online questionnaire. Notice that &quot;Not known&quot; is a selectable option for one's marital status:</p>
<p><em>(image redacted)</em></p>
<p>I don't know why someone's marital status would legally be unknown.</p>
<p>Under what cases would someone truthfully able to answer on a legal form that they don't know their marital status?</p>
<p>I can think of some possibilities that this field can be filled as unknown, such as if someone's filling in the form on someone else's behalf or if the filler has a mental disability. However, for the purposes of this post, let's ignore cases where one cannot recall one's marital status on their own, and only consider the case where it would legally be unknown.</p>
<p>I think one instance is if someone's working on getting their marriage annulled and doesn't know whether the process is complete or not. But are there other cases?</p>

<p>This <em><a href="https://www.womansdivorce.com/marriage-annulment.html" rel="noreferrer">Marriage Annulment FAQ</a></em> purports to be based on real-world examples. The reasons for not knowing the status of a marriage appear to fall into three main categories;</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That the marriage <em>process</em> is later found out to be suspect (e.g. that the marriage may not have been conducted or registered correctly)</p>
</li>
<li><p>The one or both parties <em>may have still been married at the time of their subsequent marriage</em> (or may not have gone sufficiently far through the process of divorce to be allowed to be legally remarried).</p>
</li>
<li><p>That the wedding or divorce have <em>additional complications relating to different territories or jurisdictions</em>, for example marrying in a foreign country and not realising that ceremony <a href="https://youtu.be/7t3RGA05P0c?t=77" rel="noreferrer">may be invalid elsewhere</a>.</p>
</li>
</ul>

<p>California law allows for &quot;no-fault&quot; divorce, where one spouse can seek a divorce unilaterally.  Normally the other spouse would be informed of this by being served with the summons.  But in some cases, <a href="https://www.courts.ca.gov/20213.htm?rdeLocaleAttr=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">service can be effected</a> by mailing the papers to a &quot;last known address&quot;, or publishing in a newspaper in an area where the other spouse is thought likely to reside.  In either case it is quite possible that the papers are never actually seen by the other spouse.</p>
<p>So there could be cases where the other spouse suspects that they may have been divorced, but doesn't know for sure, and hasn't done the necessary research to find out.</p>

<p>As one example, spouses of the same sex who married <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_2004_same-sex_weddings" rel="nofollow noreferrer">in San Francisco in February-March 2004</a> could certainly be forgiven for being uncertain of their legal marital status.  Their marriages initially appeared valid, were fought through several levels of appeals over the following six months, and eventually <a href="https://casetext.com/case/lockyer-v-city-and-county-of-san-francisco" rel="nofollow noreferrer">voided by the state Supreme Court</a>.</p>
<p>Same-sex marriage was then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Marriage_Cases" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ruled to be constitutionally permitted in May 2008</a>; then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">banned again via initiative constitutional amendment</a> in November 2008; and finally, after five more years of appeals, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollingsworth_v._Perry" rel="nofollow noreferrer">legalized again based on a 2013 US Supreme Court Ruling</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.aclu.org/other/frequently-asked-questions-about-marriage-california-practical-guide-same-sex-couples" rel="nofollow noreferrer">According to the ACLU</a>,  the 2004 licenses remained void, and such couples would have had to legally remarry either in summer 2008 or after 2013.  But if they weren't particularly legally savvy or well informed about the latest developments, there could very well have been points in this process at which they honestly didn't know whether they were legally married.</p>
