Relazioni di coppia e diritto

This essay examines the law of couple relationships fifty years after the reform of Italian family law, reading it through several dichotomies that have long shaped family-law discourse: institution and contract, nature and culture, body and will, act and fact. The single marital form that emerged from the 1975 reform has given way to a pluralistic regime. Couples may now choose a strong bond — marriage for different-sex couples, civil union for same-sex couples — or, in either case, a weak one: cohabitation, which may or may not be further regulated by agreement. The common diagnosis of a weakening marital bond, which for the same reasons should extend to civil unions, is neither certain nor settled. It must reckon with developments that betray a dissatisfaction with that weakening, chief among them the rise of liability for breach of personal family obligations (so-called intra-family torts) alongside liability for breach of patrimonial ones. On this reading, even the possibility of agreements on the conduct of family life does not make such obligations freely disposable. Case law, including that of the Constitutional Court, pulls in two directions at once. It has renewed the constitutional principle protecting the unity of the family and extended it to cohabiting couples, while countervailing pressures, legislative ones included, push to recast divorce from a remedy into a unilateral withdrawal. What remains is the family as the institution in which the couple transcends itself in parenthood. The essay closes by considering some of the family's social functions, including de iure condendo.