Legal Consequences of Marital Relationship Actual Termination for the Property Relationships of Spouses

The specific of the regime of spouses property relations who have actually terminated marital relations is recognized and embodied in the legal norms of many European legal orders. In the Russian Family Code there is no concept of “actual termination of the marital relations”; the legal significance of the relevant fact for the property relations of spouses remains outside the scope of lawmaking attention. However, in juridical practice, this circumstance has a number of significant legal consequences that have not yet received generalization and understanding in the legal doctrine. The main goal of this study is, based on the analysis of judicial practice, to establish the real significance of the actual breakdown of the family for the property relations of the spouses, to identify its legal consequences through the systematization of the most frequently stated requirements and formulated law positions, and to assess these consequences in terms of their need for legislative systematization. It has been established that in the current jurisprudence the idea of “actual termination of marriage” as a full-fledged fact-state, entailing a number of legal consequences, united by the general principle is formed: in the opinion of the courts, with respect to the property relations of such persons, this fact has a meaning equivalent to that of the fact of termination of the marriage. The legal consequences of the actual termination of marital relations aresystematized and divided into two groups (expressed in the shift in the boundaries of the legal regime of marital property in time; in the transition from the presumption of joint use of income received from the sale or use of common property to the presumption of their distribution). It has been proved the expediency of law-making interpretation of the results of discretionary creativity of the courts for their compliance with social expectations and moral and ethical ideas of society, as well as the position and logic of the legislator, both in terms of recognizing the actual termination of marital relations of legal significance in principle, and in terms of linking to this fact to legal consequences.

legal regime, property relations, burden of proof, actual termination, marital relationship, spouses, spouses’ property, common joint property