This paper examines the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights as an institutional instrument 
of marital coercion, tracing its intellectual and legal origins in European ecclesiastical and 
common law traditions, its transplantation into colonial India, and its persistence in the 
contemporary Indian legal order under Section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Using an 
institutional economic history lens, the paper argues that conjugal rights law was never merely a 
domestic remedy it was a mechanism through which the state enforced a particular model of 
marriage as an economic and social contract in which the wife's body, labour, and reproductive 
capacity were treated as alienable assets belonging to the marital institution. Drawing on the 
Halean doctrine of implied consent, English equity jurisprudence, the Indian colonial encounter 
with personal law, and post-independence constitutional challenges, the paper evaluates the 
structural tension between spousal restitution decrees and the emerging constitutional 
recognition of sexual autonomy. The paper concludes that Section 9, while formally gender
neutral, carries an institutional memory of coercion that cannot be neutralised by procedural 
reform alone, and that its retention represents an unresolved colonial inheritance in Indian 
family law.