Constitutional Experience of the Formalization of Marriage in European and American States

Abstract

The relevance of the topic is mediated by the importance of the institution of marriage in the humanities and law, in particular. Thus, in the constitutional branch of science, the institution of marriage did not act as an independent subject of research. In the applied aspect, the relevance is confirmed by changes at a high constitutional level, when the Basic Law of Russia in 2020 was supplemented by paragraph "j.1" of Part 1 of Article 72 on the protection of the institution of marriage as a union of a man and a woman. Taken together, the arguments pushed the author to a comparative legal study, the results of which made it possible to propose a set of criteria for analyzing foreign constitutions for fixing various aspects of marriage in them. The catalog of the main criteria by the author includes the following provisions formalizing marriage in the context of subjective law, definitions and blank norms; protection / protection of marriage; procedural aspects of marriage; marriage in the security context of other statuses; marriage in the context of the powers of the state and its bodies.