Professor Beth Burkstrand-Reid will present at the “Women, Capacity and Decisionmaking” conference hosted by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law this week. Burkstrand-Reid will present her paper, “Stuck in the Middle with You,” which examines the relationship between the regulation of marriage and the rise of cohabitation. It argues that by disallowing couples from entering into contracts concerning how marriages are run, marriage as an institution may be rendered obsolete as is demonstrated by recent statistics showing that Americans think marriage is of decreasing importance.