БРАЧНИ УГОВОР
THE CONTRACT OF MARRIAGE

Summary/Abstract: The discussion concerning the legal nature of marriage has been a constant legal problem. The author begins with the generally accepted viewpoint that marriage, in terms of its origin, is a contract. However, marriage is a contract, or is becoming more and more one, also as a permanent state of affairs. Its essence is nothing else but exercising rights and carrying out duties specified in a contract. Considerable increase in number of dispositive legal norms too, by which spouses settle their mutual relations, and corresponding reduction in number of imperative norms (such as agreement about place of residence, about managing the household, etc.) speak in favour of the above viewpoint. Hence, Yugoslav marriage law has effected an evolution, while moving from a relatively rigid social and institutional conception toward the one amounting to a purely personal and contractual relationship. Accepting a divorce with mutual understanding of spouses intensifies in a significant way, in the area of dissolving the marriage, the contractual character of marriage. Marriage is therefore a consensual and formal contract, whose substance is predominantly determined by law. Such a standpoint agrees also with the basic principles of the law of contract, of the principles of freedom of contracting, and of the principle of consensus. Marriage, although a contract, did not lose all of its institutional forms. It remains a basis of family, which has still preserved its traditionally collectivistic and solidarity values - in spite of aggressive individualism.

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