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I. Introduction
In July 2007, the Law Commission for England and Wales1 published its final report on the legal principles that should be applied when a cohabiting relationship comes to an end. The report considers the responses to its consultation paper-which was published in 20062-and refines and hones the scheme set out in the earlier paper in the light of those responses.
It may seem surprising that this issue has not been the subject of official consideration before. After all, cohabitation began to emerge as a significant social trend as long ago as the 1960s,3 and the first legislative initiatives responding to this trend by conferring rights upon cohabiting couples were taken in the 1970s.4 In fact, the current report has a longer history than the two-year span of the current project might suggest: the Law Commission first considered whether to carry out a review of the legal position of cohabitants in the late 1970s,5 but apart from commissioning a survey on the law relating to the enforceability of cohabiting contracts,6 no action was taken. In 1992, it was suggested that "the time may now be ripe for a more systematic consideration of the subject as a whole,"7 but the project that was actually undertaken in the mid-1990s was both narrower and wider in scope, since it focused solely on property rights but encompassed all those who shared a home. At this time there was no Law Commissioner specialising in family law, and the project was carried out within the Property and Trust Law team. While cohabitants fell within the scope of the project, the concept of "home-sharers" also encompassed married couples, relatives, and friends. The difficulties of devising a single scheme that would provide a fair solution in these different contexts proved insuperable, and in 2002, the Law Commission produced a discussion paper setting out the key problems with the law and advocating that the law should be developed through judicial decisions rather than legislative reform.8 However, it also identified "a wider need for the law to recognise and to respond to the increasing diversity of living arrangements in this country."9
One of the suggested mechanisms for so doing was the formal registration of nonmarital relationships, and in 2004-in response to a variety...