2 Nature and Scope of Family Law

Nature: 1. Personal-law character: family law follows status and community more than territory — Nepal's journey is precisely from personal-religious law to a uniform civil code; 2. A hybrid discipline: part private law (property, obligations between family members), part public law (the state's interest in marriage registration, child protection, criminal sanctions for child marriage, bigamy, domestic violence); 3. Status-and-property intertwined: family law creates statuses (spouse, parent, adopted child, heir) and attaches property consequences (maintenance, partition shares, inheritance); 4. Morality-laden and dynamic: the most value-contested legal field — religion, gender roles and child welfare all contest its rules; the field where legal change and social change track each other most visibly. Scope (the map of this course): marriage (Unit 2); matrimonial remedies and divorce (Unit 3); parents and children — paternity, custody, guardianship, curatorship, surrogacy and IVF (Unit 4); adoption (Unit 5); partition, property and inheritance (Unit 6); and the family-justice machinery — family courts and family dispute resolution (Unit 7).