On The Validity Of The Loyalty Agreement Of Couple

As the society and economy progress,traditional perspectives of values,marriage,etc.vary remarkably.Nowadays,serious social problems caused by credit failings and moral decline are not rare,and the divorce rate is spiraling upwards.In this case,solemn vows and pledges exchanged by lovers could not guarantee a faithful marriage,moral baseline only no longer provide enough trusts between couples.Thus,marital loyalty agreements,which stipulate the expense of infidelity as divesting of rights,emerge as a respond.Recently,more court cases associated with marital loyalty agreements occur.As for the legal validity of the agreement,there are inconsistent views in academia,some scholars support it,while others not.No consensus and conclusion are reached till now.In judicial practice,it’s also a controversial issue to identify the effectiveness.Cognitive dissonance among different judges would then lead to polar opposite court decisions for one case related to a marital loyalty agreement.In this paper,there are four sections to state the validity of marital loyalty agreements.The first section discussed the marital loyalty agreement in general,and then provided the definition and different types of it.The second section demonstrated the necessity and feasibility of law intervention on marital loyalty agreements in terms of necessities of the nature and function of realistic matrimonial system,of disputes defusing in judicial adjudications,of legislative gap filling for existing marriage law,and of function realization for a marital loyalty agreement.Besides,by referring related regulations for this sort of agreements in many different countries and regions,also combined with judicial practical experiences in China,the necessities of law adjustment on marital loyalty agreements was discussed.The third section referred to the controversial identification for the validity of loyalty agreements due to “co-different sentence” phenomenon,indicated the approval opinions and shortcomings for both remarks of “valid group” and “invalid group” by evaluating and analyzing.According to comparison,the author provided some personal views for this problem,that is,weather a marital loyalty agreement is defined to be effective should consider various elements.For each specific condition,no definite solution is effective,simple announcement of “valid” or “invalid” is not reasonable.To assessing rationally,form and content,realistic value of agreements,as well as potential social response,should be considered as a whole.The forth and last section addressed that the effectiveness of a marital loyalty agreement could be properly evaluated and analyzed from various aspects of subject elements,intention elements,content elements,duration elements,and special effective constituents.Furthermore,categorization of agreements was reviewed to get reasonable conclusions.Physical marital loyalty agreements with claims of bodily harm,restrictions,or disfranchisement should be rejected to maintain the principle of public order and good social customs,also to protect civil rights given by law.For property agreements that punish the cheaters by partially or totally deprive the property ownership,as long as they are free expressed by proper subjects with no fraud or coercion,unanimously agreed,with no violation to legal compulsory and no damage to public interest,should be determined as legal and effective.Meanwhile,the aggregate amount of compensation,as well as advisable adjustment for unreasonable punish penalty,were discussed.As for agreements with both physical and property claims,the effectiveness was identified mainly based on the divisibility of these two parts of terms.To sum up,related issues of marital loyalty agreements should be reasonably defined and interpreted with proper operability,thus to concrete the abstract duty of loyalty into feasible legal norms,and to confirm the legal validity of marital loyalty agreements with no fuzziness.By improving existing laws and regulations with the guidance of judicial justice,certain claims of agreements should be guaranteed.Furthermore,goals for marriage value could be properly reached as a result of effective marital loyalty agreements.