On The Legal Adjustment Of De-facto Marriage

Marriage is one kind of social phenomenon essentially and a kind of social relations between people. Since mankind has entered the class society, marriage has become the object of laws'adjustment. At present the law has two kind of legislative principles for the establishment of one marriage, namely de-facto marriage principle and marriage in form principle. Under the marriage in form principle, regardless of the legal marriage or the ceremony marriage principle, de-facto marriage can be formed.Due to lack of the formal important documents which lead to the conflicts between the form and the essential, de-facto marriage has the features of subjective purposiveness, objective feasibility, relational public announcement, form illegality and substantive compliance. Chinese Marriage Law only acknowledges the marriage after the marriage registration, but there are still a large number of de facto marriages in the real life, as a result, various legal problems are generated and should the de-facto marriage be protected and how to protect is an unavoidable problem.According to the overseas legislative patterns, the de-facto marriage occurs generally in the countries where the registration marriage principle or the ceremony marriage principle is adapted. It can be distinguished by the standard of the center of gravity for legislation, or the standard of whether marriage effect is related to legal effect. It has become a common practice all over the world to acknowledge and give legal effects to de-facto marriage conditionally and provide remedies to the parties of de-facto marriage.Since the establishment of our country, de-facto marriage in China went through four stages which are acknowledging, conditional acknowledging, non acknowledging and comparative acknowledging. The main shortcomings of existing legislation is that China's marriage law do not have a clear and consistent attitude towards de-facto marriage and meanwhile, the requirement that "should re-submit the registration" do not have enough interoperability. These are the detriments of the law's seriousness.It is necessary to analyze the legislation defects of present de-facto marriage and elaborate the necessity of relative acknowledgment of de-facto marriage via the defects created by the indefiniteness of de-facto marriage's concept and establishment conditions and practical operation, specific legislative proposals should be presented from two aspects of consummating marriage registration system and conditional acknowledging de-facto marriage.