Legal Issues Returning Betrothal Gifts

Betrothal gifts has a profound cultural background as an integral part of the traditional legal culture with the development process from customs,legislation to customs and it is still widely alive in the rural society today.However,Marriage Law enacted after the founding of new China has always been closed to betrothal gifts resulting that the disputes resolved are utterly baseless from the angle of laws.In order to make up the loopholes in legislation the Supreme People's Court issued the judicial interpretation ?of Marriage Law on April 1,2004 and thus the disputes have the legal basis.However,the rough and vague contents of the judicial interpretation did not fully cover the specific operation of solving the disputes on betrothal gifts in the real life.In addition of the legislative defects the judicial activities encountered many obstacles.The same cases which have different sentences in the same areas emerge endlessly.This paper adopts the method of the empirical research in sociology of law extracting 203 civil judgments made by people's courts at different levels through sampling,and through analyzing and studying the samples the problems existing in the current judicial practice of solving disputes on betrothal gifts are reported.In view of the legal problems presented in judicial practice the author puts forward relevant legislative suggestions,such as clarifying the legal status of engagements and betrothal gifts,clarifying the range of betrothal gifts,introducing the fault compensation liability system and so on.Considering the rigorousness of the legislative process and the degree of slow legislation,the author puts forward some ideas about the trials using the example of the People's Court of Jiang yan City in Jiang su province forming the sentence opinions about solving disputes on betrothal gifts taking the prefecture-level city as the unit which developed gradually into the specifications at the provincial level from municipal specifications solving the phenomenon of the same cases with different sentences in order to set up the judicial authority.