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This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state's role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination - through official policies such as segregation - to prohibiting discrimination - through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of discrimination persists, often in forms that are hard to regulate or even to recognize. At this challenging moment, the intimate domain presents a vital terrain for study in two main ways. First, conceptually, studying the intimate domain permits new insights into discrimination and the law's identity categories, because people are more willing to be explicit about identity-based preferences in this domain than in others (such as employment). Second, practically, examining the intimate domain reveals the ways that relationships in this sphere affect hierarchies and opportunities in more public domains, and the role the state plays in those relationships. This Article therefore examines intimate discrimination, focusing on race, sex, and disability, and identifies key norms for each category. For race, the norm is homogamy, or pairing with one's own type; for sex, by contrast, the norm is heterogamy, pairing outside one's type; and for disability, the norm is desexualization, rather than pairing with one group or another. The Article does not assume that intimate discrimination is necessarily bad. On the contrary, examining the nuanced landscape of discrimination in this realm is one of the Article's main purposes. Ultimately, the Article concludes that, at the level of individual interaction, intimate differentiation based on these identity traits can be good, bad, or neutral, depending on context. For this and other reasons, legal regulation targeting individual differentiation on these bases would be woefully misguided. Nonetheless, the state plays important roles in intimate discrimination at a structural level. By creating the infrastructure of society, the state shapes the accidents of who meets whom and how. In addition, the state plays a role in the hierarchy of intimate opportunities by shaping social capital and relative advantages. The state therefore should reform its laws and policies to attend to its structural role in intimate discrimination. For sex, the most obvious next step is to cease to restrict marriage according to sex. For disability, the state should help to encourage opportunities for intimate affiliation by, among other things, attending to the architecture of intimacy, by which I mean the ways that structures of accommodation operate to help or hinder not only access, but also closeness. For race, the state's goal should not be to encourage race mixing, but rather to lift burdens on existing relationships, such as residential segregation. Recognizing how intimate affiliations affect opportunities and status hierarchies, both in the intimate sphere and beyond, points us toward new ways to intervene in the persistent problem of discrimination.

Marital names shape our ideas about marriage, about our children, and about our selves. For about a hundred years, American states required married women to take their husbands' names in order to engage in basic civic activities such as voting. While the law no longer requires women to change their names, it still shapes people's decisions about marital names in both formal and informal ways. For example, the formal legal default rule in most places is that both spouses keep their premarital names. This rule is minoritarian for women, which means it imposes a range of social costs on women who make the most conventional naming choice. But the rule is majoritarian for men, which means it does nothing to unsettle the most robust aspect of our current marital naming conventions--the fact that men almost never change their names, even to hyphenate. This fact about men's names--coupled with the fact that children almost always have their father's name, even if their mother makes an unconventional naming choice for herself--means that women are ostensibly choosing their marital names, but in fact they are choosing from a very limited decision set. That is, women effectively can have nominal continuity either with their past (their families of origin and premarital selves) or with their future (their children and possibly their spouse), but not across all three generations. The formal legal default that both spouses keep their names reinforces this bind for women. Informally, legal institutions also shape choices through "desk-clerk law," that is, advice given by the government functionaries who answer public inquiries at state and local agencies. These legal actors frequently mislead people and discourage unconventional naming choices as a result of ignorance or their own views about proper practice. Because states historically reinforced a regime of patrilineal descent of names, what might seem a neutral default regime is inadequate. States should set defaults and frame choices to encourage more egalitarian decisions about whether to change names and how. States could try any number of creative solutions using existing categories for thinking about choice regimes, drawn from contract-law theory: default rules (what rule the state fills in if the parties don't speak to the contrary); menus (what range of options parties are given); and altering rules (what steps parties must take to contract around the default rule into different alternatives). Most modestly, states could adopt a "forced choosing" approach, requiring both spouses to state their postmarital names. More ambitiously, states might encourage hyphenation and, at the next generation, "biphenation"--defined as the passing of one name from each hyphenated parent--by making this the default option. States could also create what might be called "framing rules," which would dictate how the state asks the question of parties in a choice regime. Framing rules encompass what information the state gives parties, what words it uses, what context surrounds the question, as well as the timing of the question. Framing rules are particularly important in contexts, such as marital names, where social conventions exert a strong influence on choices, and where desk-clerk law is likely to be erroneous or misleading.