On Legal Protection Of Unmarried Cohabitation

The rapid expansion of the phenomenon of unmarried cohabitation develops grim challenges to traditional family law system. On one hand, the complexity of this problem is increasing to provoke greater social concern; on the other hand, the present law fails to keep pace with the changes of social reality to regulate unmarried cohabitation. Its legal problem will definitely be one of the prominent concerns in the field of family law. This paper mainly probes into the justification for legal protection of unmarried cohabitation as well as the detailed models of such protection. Besides preface and conclusion, the paper consists of three chapters.Chapter one provides a brief review of the legislation history of unmarried cohabitation since the implementation of the policies of reform and opening to the outside world. The concept of unmarried cohabitation undergoes changes from"illicit cohabitation"to"cohabitation relationship". And the extension of such concept is subject to the cognizance of De Facto Marriage by Judicial Interpretations, which currently eliminates negative evaluations towards unmarried cohabitation and holds a basically neutral attitude with few active protection.Chapter two testifies the justification for legal protection of unmarried cohabitation. First, from the point of individual rights, this chapter argues that such protection is the necessary demand to advocate liberty and equality; second, from the point of potential influences over public interests, this chapter not only offers reasons to give marriage priority on the ground of public interests, but also discuss the potential harms to marriage resulting from such protection; finally, this chapter points out that such protection maybe beneficial to overall public interests.Chapter three illustrates two legislative models to protect unmarried cohabitation, namely the CM (contractual model) and SM (status model) .After describing typical legislations of these two models briefly and commenting on both the advantages and disadvantages of them, this chapter proposes legislation countermeasures against such phenomenon from two levels---minimal protection and higher protection to cater for the practical needs in China.