The leading case came before the supreme court of New York in 1809, when Chief Justice Kent accepted as binding a common-law marriage, declaring that no solemnization was requisite; that "a contract of marriage made _per verba de praesenti_ amounts to an actual marriage, and is as valid as if made in _facie ecclesiae_;" and that the existence of such a contract may be proved "from cohabitation, reputation, acknowledgment of the parties, acceptance in the family, and other circumstances from which a marriage may be inferred."[606] This decision determined the policy of New York for nearly a century, until the common-law marriage was at last superseded by the statute of 1901; and its influence upon the tribunals of other states has been increased through the sanction of its doctrine by the leading authorities upon matrimonial law.[607] The contract by mere present consent of the parties, regardless of the statutory requirements, has been widely accepted as valid in the group of southern and southwestern states and territories. It was so judicially accepted in South Carolina[608] at least as early as 1832; in Louisiana[609] in 1833; Georgia[610] in 1860; District of Columbia[611] in 1865; Alabama[612] in 1869; Arkansas[613] in 1872; Missouri[614] in 1877; and Florida[615] in 1880. By the earlier decisions of Tennessee a strict compliance with the statute was required, the court even declaring in 1829[616] that a marriage solemnized before a justice of the peace out of his own county was "absolutely null and void." This opinion was sustained by a decree of 1831; but later judgments favor the common-law agreement. Texas has had a similar experience. In 1883 and again in 1894 the common-law contract was repudiated, the court deciding that license and parental consent according to the statute were essential;[617] but more recently the highest tribunal has held the opposite view.[618] Among the states of the middle and western group Pennsylvania in 1814 was first to follow the New York precedent.[619] Ohio[620] came next in 1861; and Illinois[621] in 1873. By the law of Michigan, declares Judge Cooley decisively in 1875--in an opinion accepted as authority by the federal courts--a marriage may be good, although the statutory regulations have not been complied with. "Whatever the form of ceremony, or even if all ceremony was dispensed with, if the parties agreed presently to take each other for husband and wife, and from that time lived together professedly in that relation, proof of these facts would be sufficient to constitute proof" of a binding marriage; and "this," he adds, "has become the settled doctrine of the American courts."[622] This view has been accepted in Iowa[623] in 1876; Minnesota[624] in 1877; Wisconsin[625] in 1879; Indiana[626] in 1884; Kansas[627] in 1887; Nebraska[628] and Colorado[629] in 1893; Nevada[630] in 1896; and favored by the decisions of New Jersey[631] since 1824. Moreover, the Supreme Court of the United States has