The offense of willfully and knowingly having more than one wife or husband at the same time. The offense of willfully and knowingly entering into a second marriage while validly married to another individual is bigamy.
The law in every state prohibits a man or a woman from being married to more than one living person at a time. The crime of having more than one current spouse is called either bigamy (having two spouses) is a subset of the crime of polygamy (having more than one spouse), and the law makes no practical distinction between the two. Even in states that separately criminalize both polygamy and bigamy…
Under certain statutes it is not considered polygamous for an individual to remarry after a certain period of time has elapsed during which the former spouse was absent and thought to be dead. For example, California exempts from its law "any person by reason of any former marriage whose husband or wife by such marriage has been absent for five successive years without being known to such p…
Legal controversies over the propriety of prohibiting polygamous marriages persisted in the United States for 150 years and were expected to continue as long as sects within the Mormon religion continued to openly support the practice of plural marriage. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disavowed polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates those members who practice plural marriage. …
Altman, Irwin. 1996. "Polygamous Family Life: the Case of Contemporary Mormon Fundamentalists." Utah Law Review (spring). Dane, Perry. 1996. "The Public, the Private, and the Sacred: Variations on a Theme of Nomos." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 8 (spring-summer). Forbes, Stephanie. 2003. "Why Just Have One?: An Evaluation of the Anti-polygamy Laws Under …
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