The principle of self-determination in the family law through history and today

In the jubilee year 2004, Serbia marks the 200th anniversary of The First Serbian Uprising, structuring of modern Serbian state and its legal system comparatively speaking, France marks the 200th anniversary of passing the French Civil Code, one of the most significant civil codifications in the 19th century. It was an occasion to study certain institutions of family law through history and today. The used approach is modern, we studied the ways how the principle of self-determination influenced the family-legal solutions today, and we investigated if one could talk about the effect of this principle in the historical sense, too. The principle of self-determination implies the possibility for the subjects of family-legal relations to arrange their own relations themselves – both the partner and parent relations. However, this principle undergoes significant limitations in the family law because the family relations are personal relations by character, as well as because of the need to protect the weaker participant, both the weaker partner or a child who needs protection stemming from his/her very status. Within marriage law, the principle of self-determination of the spouses (extramarital partners) is, among other things, made concrete through the possibility for an agreement about the effects of marriage (extramarital union), then through the possibility of agreed divorce, while the procedure of mediation in the marriage litigation contributes to the realization of the mentioned principle. As for the effects of marriage (extramarital union), the paper particularly discusses property relations, that is the marriage property contract, because it is at the moment a current issue in our domestic law. Within the relations between parents and children, the concretization of the principle of self-determination in parental care is significant, particularly in the situations when the relations between the parents were disturbed and resulted in a separation or a divorce with the joint parental care (application of the parental right). All institutions are analyzed in the positive law, in the historical context (solutions from the Serbian Civil Code the former Hungarian Law), and viewed comparatively in the European legal systems of the east and west European countries