Proxineta

The civil-law name of a kind of broker or agent making a business of promoting marriages. All contracts and agreements respecting marriage (commonly called marriage-brokage contracts), by which a party engages to give another a compensation, if he will negotiate an advantageous marriage for him, are void, as being injurious to or subversive of the public interest. But the civil law does not seem to have held contracts of this sort in such severe rebuke; for it allowed proxinetce, or match-makers, to receive a reward for their services to a limited extent. And the period is comparatively modern in which a different doctrine was engrafted into the common law, and received the high sanction of the house of lords. Now all marriage-brokage contracts are utterly void as against public paid under them may be recovered back iu a court of ec[uity. 1 Story Eg. Jur, 260.