Grundzüge eines öffentlichen Familienrechts

In the eyes of legal science up to now, the family has mainly been a subject of family law as a part of civil law, and the main function of family law was to regulate the internal legal relationships among family members. Public law however deals with the community of the family primarily in connection with certain situations and problems, as an annex to other subjects to be regulated, and not from a wide perspective. This means that the family is in danger of being added to partial branches of the law which have other aims, and that in each case it will be as an element which is alien to the system. Article 6, subsection 1 of the German Basic Law however suggests that the family should be taken into consideration in public law so that coordinated standards for its position in society can be developed. Thus Christian Seiler advocates a »public family law,« whose essential features have to be enlarged upon generally and in particular for tax law, social law and social security law.