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Numerous ancient texts present prescriptions on Christianity's ethic, liturgy, leadership, and other institutions. Scholars call 'church order literature' a few of them composed in Greek, because of literary dependencies among them that make them an identifiable corpus. The composition of some of them seems to begin in the first century. In the fourth century, Christians began to gather them in various collections. While all these texts and their collections have no common literary genre, they do all purport to convey a tradition of apostolic teaching on the conduct of church life and its institutions. This teaching sees God's law based on Christian scripture as the only valid law for church life. This article will present the prescriptions of that law conveyed by the ancient church order literature on the following topics: family requirements for membership in the church, prohibitions defining and defending marriage, regulations on family relationships, and restrictions on who may marry. Even in its dispositions on marriage and family, the ancient church order literature attests Christians' contact with multiple legal regimes in the Roman empire. This literature reflects a view of the ancient Christian family that is typical in its difference from, and its similarity to, Greco-Roman conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engagement or promise of marriage has been known since ancient times and has always been interconnected with the institution of marriage. The New Civil Code introduced engagement among institutions of family law, motivated by the fact that "traditional social reality" in our country requires it. Legal acts of engagement have evolved over time, moving from contract rigors to a simple fact, which does not imply the fiances' obligation to marry one another. For a long period of time, engagement couldn't be found in legal regulations and it was recentely introduced in the legal area as an independent institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the historiography, the law, and the practice of irregular marriage in Britain. It argues that there has been a confusion of terms in the historiography of irregular marriage that has served to obscure its meaning, pattern, and incidence. Using evidence from Scotland where irregular marriage continued to be legally valid until 1939 (with one form remaining legally valid until 2006), the article argues that despite its legally valid status, the interpretation of what constituted irregular marriage was extremely limited and that it served as a de facto or functional equivalent to civil marriage.In the formal legal sense Scotland had stood virtually alone amongst Western European countries in enshrining simple exchange of consent as sufficient basis for marriage. However, in practice Scotland was very similar to other countries in what was regarded as acceptable forms of contracting marriage and the same stigma was attached to informal or irregular unions that we see elsewhere. However, as elsewhere, the majority of people conformed to the legal rules and the legal paradigms of marriage, but equally there was no neat correspondence between legal codes and social practice with ordinary people adopting a more flexible definition of marriage than the official one. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As evidenced by laws addressing abandonment of the home and children, family preservation was paramount for early twentieth-century Latin American nation builders. The judicial record of abandonment cases from Guatemala demonstrates how men attempted to enforce their authority in the home and then enlisted state officials to uphold it when their wives or daughters defied them. Yet, abandonment litigation often liberated women. By condoning female flight as a response to domestic abuse, judges emancipated women with the very laws intended to corral them. The same gendered institutions that buttressed patriarchies also provided women with the tools to challenge men's perceived right to intimidate and beat women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late nineteenth century, a new category of law—‘the family’—spread across and beyond Europe via new legal codes and scholarship. These made explicit the relationship between marriage, the family and the state and emphasised the interiority of the family as a ‘protective’ enclave. Yet the incoherence of this position as it played out in legislative debate is often overlooked. This article examines parliamentary debates over mixed marriages in Hungary, as an interesting window on the state's inability to clarify political priorities vis-à-vis the family. Catholic factions and anti-clerical opposition alike were troubled by the idea of state intervention in any form, in a century characterised by a general tendency towards state legislation as a primary source of law. This ambiguity revealed itself as a series of oscillations that were located squarely within the deep ambiguities of modern European legal culture concerning the family as a site of cultural freedom and as a (necessary) target of state intervention. These oscillations undermined what might be described as a straightforward patriarchal approach to gender order in family law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay on family law and moral reform in Cape Town, South Africa in the Victorian era is presented. It particularly examines illegitimacy and bastardy, commenting on the welfare of illegitimate children and their parents. Laws relating to marriage and divorce are considered. The author also reflects on adultery, concubinage, and fornication.

Examines the impact of law on the modern American family using a historical perspective. English roots of laws respecting marriage and family life; Definition of common law; The colonial experience; Transition of laws respecting family in the immediate post-Revolutionary America; Ideological change in American family law; Emergence of American family law; Family and law in the twenty-first century.

Reprints an article from the February 24, 1900 issue of the `Journal of the American Medical Association' (JAMA) describing an attempt by Colorado lawmakers to regulate marriage by requiring all applicants to undergo physical exams. Exclusion from marriage of all individuals with hereditary and infectious diseases; Difficulty of enforcing such a law.