The Study Of Legal Issues About Non-marital Cohabitation Property Disputes

Though unmarried cohabitation existed since the ancient period of human development and had a long history, it started to increase significantly around the world, especially in the western countries, after the 1960s. The attitude of western countries society to unmarried cohabitation also went through a long developing history, from opposition to acception, and now to a widely legal regulation. Since the 1990s, unmarried cohabitation started to prevail in China. However, because of the embedded influence of the traditional morality and the Chinese Marriage Law, the attitude of our laws to this phenomenon was evasive, and with few and fragmentary adjustment and regulation of the civil law towards it. We still didn't get a relatively systematic legislation for the reasonable, effective standardization of unmarried cohabitation. Like the situation of most other countries in the world, the law's elusion of this issue had no effect on the decrease of unmarried cohabitation, but will lead to the difficulties of dispute resolution (especially for these property disputations), and more following social problems. Herein, according to the requirement of harmonious society construction, it was important to establish the corresponding legal system that enlists the property disputation of unmarried cohabitation into the law's regulation scope.The paper consisted of introduction, the main text, and conclusion. The main text of the paper contained three parts.The first part was the theoretical analysis about the property disputation caused by unmarried cohabition, including the summarization of unmarried cohabitation, and the theoretical analysis for the unique status of the property relationship in unmarried cohabitation and the property ownership. On the basis of cohabitation definition, according to the comparison of the view points of this issue from different countries, abroad and domestic, it concluded the definition of unmarried cohabitation, namely the factual status that two adults, who were without impediment to marriage, lived together of their own accord, but with no marriage certificate. The differences of unmarried cohabitation and relative conception were also elaborated. Then, it analyzed the unique status of the property relationship of unmarried cohabitation, the main point was that the property was the economic foundation of cohabitation, thus was the centrality of the regulation of relative laws. It was the most important thing to solve the property disputation caused by unmarried cohabitation with respect to the regulation of this popular social phenomenon. At last of this part, the property ownership of unmarried cohabitation was investigated. There were two kinds of theory about the property ownership of this relationship abroad, i.e. the independent property principle and the community property principle. While referring to China, it was executed mainly according to the contractual property system, supplied by the community property principle.The second part was about the legislation of the property disputation of unmarried cohabitation around the world. The foreign legislation of the property disputation of unmarried cohabitation was introduced at first of this part, from the internal and external validity of the correlative laws. The internal validity of law mentioned here included the property system, the fostering relationship, the inheritance relationship, and so on. Then the current situation in China was also elaborated. The third part was about the juristic deliberation about the Chinese issue of property disputation aroused by unmarried cohabitation. In the first place, the importance and necessity to regulate the resolvation of property disputation of unmarried cohabitation was analyzed. It was pointed out that the phenomenon of unmarried cohabitation in the ancient and modern society had its reasonability and reality. The regulation of the relative laws agreed with the requirement of the civil legislation perfecting and the rule by law, at the same time, it would play a positive role for the social stability. In the second place, the five basic principles were presented, for the legal institutions construction of the property disputation referred to unmarried cohabitation. The five principles were Value Neutrality, Different Treatment and Individual Regulation against marriage, Contract System combined with Law System, Fairness and Justice, and Conservation and Compensation. In the last place, some specific proposals were raised for the construction of the laws for the property disputation caused by unmarried cohabitation, from the following two aspects, the internal (including the property system, the right of claim for economic compensation, the right for heritage, etc.) and external validity of laws.