In an era when relations between men and women are governed by the principles of equality and liberty, we may ask whether it is appropriate to preserve a post-divorce support entitlement between spouses, and what justification there is for doing so. European legislation is not very forthcoming in this regard, and this means that looking for the justification for entitlement to an allowance to compensate for financial disparities calls for a tool to be developed first that would identify that justification. After testing a two-option model in which the traditional support and compensation functions of a post-divorce financial allowance were contrasted and finding that this model did not provide a useful comparison between the selected European legal systems, a second, three-option model was developed and applied to those systems. The second model distinguishes the support, compensation and insurance justifications and can identify more pronounced differences. However, this does not mean that there are any noteworthy differences among the various post-divorce allowances in terms of the amounts awarded.
