- What is family law?
- Marriage and marital relations
- Parent-family relationships
- Divorce and separations
- Adoption and guardianship
We explain what family law is and how it regulates marital and paternal-family relationships. Also, divorce and adoption.
What is family law?
The right to family or family law is the branch of civil law who studies the rules and regulations that affect the personal and patrimonial relationships of all family nuclei. In other words, it is the right applied to the affairs and interests of the family, understood as the nucleus of the society.
Family law has as its axis the family, marriage and filiation, which are institutions and central processes in the composition of modern societies. This goes from the legal definition of the family and what are the forms of constitution of the heritage family, to the types of marital union and the rights enshrined by it.
In many respects, family law has to do with duties and obligations that are incoercible, that is, that cannot be enforced by the Condition, and its fulfillment lies in the ethics and the habit. In that fine line between the guidelines of public order and family relationships, this branch of law.
Marriage and marital relations
Marriage and filiation are the pillars of family law, since they are the legal concepts available to the State to regulate the formation of a family. Thus, the first family unit is made up of the spouses, whether or not they have descendants.
In fact, there may be a family without it, or there may be offspring outside the constitution of a family, so that it is the conjugal union (marriage, civil union, concubinage or any other) the one that gives rise to families.
Similarly, family law contemplates what kind of conjugal unions are possible and recognizable before the law: marriage, cohabitation, equal marriage or in some cases civil union, depending on the legislation of each country and especially of its cultural background.
In this, it should be remembered, the biology and the religion, since marriage and its legal definitions are clearly a human, subjective and culturally (if not ideological) concept. Marriage is considered a contract like any other protected by law according to specific regulations and standards.
Parent-family relationships
In a similar way, family law deals with filiation, which is the legalization of descent, that is, the legal and legal link between parents and descendants. This link carries rights and duties, such as:
- Parental authority. That is to say, the paternal authority over the rights, assets and the destiny of their descendants, until the moment in which they themselves reach the age of majority and are legally capable of representing themselves.
- The compulsory maintenance. That assigns parents (especially in case of divorce) the task of financially supporting their descendants until they are of legal working age.
- The identity family. That grants the surname and full social and legal recognition to the descendants of a person, whether biological or not, in accordance with legal regulations and legal that protect the identity of future generations.
- The inheritance. That it transmits the assets and capital of the deceased parents to their descendants in the event that there are no wills that contradict it. In many cases, not only the assets are inherited, but also the debts and obligations.
Divorce and separations
Just as the family is constituted by the decision and the union of the spouses, it can also be separated according to legal provisions that regulate the distribution of what was, until then, a conjugal economic community.
In this way, guidelines or methods of mediation and negotiation are established, to guarantee that the dissolution of the couple does not violate the rights of anyone. It tries to protect especially the descendants, since the ties of filiation survive the family disintegration: the parents remain parents even if they are no longer a couple.
Adoption and guardianship
Apart from the biological way to have offspring, adoption is a mechanism enshrined in the law so that a child without a family can be incorporated into a new one, even if biologically it is not the child of the couple. This process is usually reserved for de facto families, that is, for couples who wish to take care of a needy minor.
Adoption is usually a complex process, in which the State is concerned with the rights of the minor, checking the good faith and the economic, psychological and social solvency of the adoptive home. If the process is finalized, the family receives the parental authority of the minor from the State, from then on to be his descendant legally and formally.