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Unit 7: Family Law and Population
7.1 Family Law
Family law — marriage, its dissolution, parent-child relations, and succession (the Family Law course, LAW5304) — is population law’s closest cousin: the family is the demographic unit, and family law’s rules set its shape and size.
7.1.1 Law on Marriage, Divorce and Judicial Separation
Marriage (the Muluki Civil Code 2074’s family book): conditions — 20 years’ age for both parties; no prohibited degrees (the Schedule’s relations); consent; monogamy; registration of marriage as the evidentiary backbone. Demographic levers: the age-20 rule (fertility’s legal tap — early marriage as both a rights violation and a fertility multiplier); registration (vital statistics’ feed).
Divorce: the statutory grounds (for either spouse — the gender-equalized grounds of the 2074 Code) through the court; the property-share and maintenance rules that make exit survivable.
Judicial separation: the court’s separation order short of dissolution — the marriage suspended, the household re-organized; historically the bridge between endurance and divorce in Nepali practice.
Demographic note: divorce law’s liberality affects family formation’s calculus; Nepal’s practice remains low-divorce with rising urban filings.
7.1.2 Single and Joint Family and Population
- Joint (extended) family: the ghar-jagga household of parents, sons, and sons’ families — the classical Nepali settlement: pooled childcare, elder care without pensions, and land held together; demographic effects: earlier childbearing in patrilocal households, pronatalism’s economic base (children as the joint estate’s heirs and labour).
- Single (nuclear) family: the migrating couple — urbanization’s unit; demographic effects: later marriage, fewer children, the care deficit (the elderly left behind in the emptied hills).
| Point | Joint family | Nuclear family |
|---|---|---|
| Childcare |
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