What is an Annulment of Marriage?
An Annulment is a way of terminating a marriage that is different from divorce and separation. Annulment is the process of nullifying of a marriage where the court declares that the marriage never took place. In order to annul a marriage, the person seeking the legal action must have sufficient grounds for annulment. What follows is a list of a few of the requirements or grounds for annulment which must be presented to the courts to terminate a marriage in this way. Grounds for annulment typically involve one party’s lack of capacity for marriage or some type of fraud. One ground for annulment is if one party had another living husband or wife at the time of marriage. This is valid even if the spouse knew about the other spouse prior to marriage. In some cases a person may have been legally denied the right to remarry, in which case this is sufficient grounds for annulment.
The law in Illinois provides certain very specific grounds to have your marriage declared invalid. This declaration of invalidity of marriage was formerly termed “annulment”. To have your marriage declared invalid, you must prove one of the following: (1) that one of the parties lacked consent to the marriage at the time because of either mental incapacity, drugs or other incapacitating substances; (2) that a party was induced to enter into the marriage by force or duress, or by fraud involving the essentials of the marriage; (3) that a party lacks the physical capacity to consummate the marriage and the other party did not know of that incapacity at the time of the marriage; (4) that a party was age 16 or 17 and did not have proper consent or judicial approval; and (5) that the marriage was a prohibited marriage. For further information, please contact us by e-mail or call attorney G. Edward Murphy at 866-681-5405.
