KARIN CARMIT YEFET
American divorce law in the twenty-first century stands on the brink of a troubling paradigmatic shift. States have begun to experiment anew with divorce-restrictive regimes, most prominently covenant marriage. This singular antidivorce mechanism—the first of its kind worldwide—establishes an optional marital framework in which exit is severely constrained. Despite a voluminous literature examining covenant marriage through sociological, theological, policy, and legal lenses, its constitutional validity has been all but ignored. This Article argues that marital freedom is an unenumerated fundamental right within the American constitutional edifice and explores the implications of that right for this novel divorce regime. It pioneers the constitutional analysis of exit barriers—whether imposed by covenant legislation or contractual stipulation—and finds them indefensible. It then confronts covenant marriage’s most radical innovation: the purported permissibility of voluntary limits on marital exit. Grounded in theories of inalienability, the Article establishes that the core right to divorce lies beyond the reach of waiver and concludes that this recognition calls into question the very legitimacy of the covenant marriage regime.