The Concepts
The majority of states recognize the family as the natural grouping upon which society and culture are based, and guarantee to protect the institution in their constitutions both as the source of social order and as indispensable to the future welfare of their nations. Hence, marriage tends to be treated as a moral institution (with or without religious significance) and those who achieve the status of spouse are vested with a number of rights which can only be varied or terminated by court order. A few states, usually because of their prevailing religion, either prohibit or discourage termination by divorce. But the majority of more secular states make no fault divorce a relatively automatic process to reflect the reality that the marriage has broken down, sometimes without the need for both parties to attend at a hearing. This has caused a major shift in social policy in many countries because, if divorce is no longer of major juridical significance in the majority of states around the world, the rules for the international recognition and enforcement of foreign divorces also no longer require cautiously framed rules.
Read more about this topic: Conflict Of Divorce Laws
Famous quotes containing the word concepts:
“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
—Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)