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You arrived at this page by selecting:Sometimes when a couple are divorcing or separating and arguing about who should get the money or the property, one of them tries to rely on an agreement they had previously used, sometimes called a pre-nup or a living together agreement, or something like that.
Traditionally these agreements are not legally binding in English law, and that remains the case strictly speaking. In other words, normally contracts are legally binding, but there are exceptions and agreements between married couples and cohabiting couples are an exception. So nobody is entitled to insist that a judge follows any such agreement just because it exists.
However, there has been much more of a tendency recently for judges to recognise these agreements in the sense of taking them into account when the judge has to exercise any sort of discretion as to what should happen, and therefore they can be useful in that sense.
In other words, they don't bind the judge in what he does, but to a degree they can be persuasive. Exactly how persuasive depends on the circumstances. If both parties had independent legal advice when they signed it and there was no (eg emotional) pressure involved, it will probably be very persuasive. Otherwise less so.
