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However, the biggest legal problem, Todd added, has been cutting that marital knot because the courts have always believed any idiot had the right to be married.

Ironically, perhaps, he quipped, that might explain why a significant number of lawyers have full-time work trying to extricate people from that supposedly simple contract.

Believe it or not, courts have regularly cited an 1885 case known as Durham v. Durham for the proposition “the contract of marriage is a simple one, which does not require a high degree of intelligence to comprehend.”

Only recently, Todd said, have courts begun to change and the law is in flux though the mental capacity considered required to marry remains low — the capacity to instruct a lawyer is held to be significantly higher and the highest level is that required to make a will.

A lack of capacity will render a marriage void but the law presumes an adult has that capacity and proving someone didn’t is tough after the fact.

In Ontario, Todd said, an important decision was a 2012 ruling by the province’s Superior Court that declared null a marriage involving an 89-year-old mentally incompetent man.

Of note, he said, was the court set aside a transfer of property to the predator’s son on the basis of the doctrines of undue influence and unconscionability, legal tools that in future could help combat these abuses.

The predator spouse in that case was a 65-year-old widow who had been married as many as eight times and had a history of caring for older men with the expectation of receiving an inheritance.