Een rechtseconomische visie op echtscheiding
Wat is een huwelijk? Wie daarover meer wil weten dan wat in artikel 1:30 BW staat te lezen, zou eens het hoofdstuk over familie- en erfrecht van Francesco Parisi en Gianpaolo Frezza moeten lezen in de onschuldig ogende Introduction to Italian Law (red. Jeffrey S. Lena en Ugo Mattei, Den Haag: Kluwer 2002, p. 407-430). Het meest verrassend is hun beschrijving van het Italiaanse echtscheidingsrecht. ‘The underlying concept of the family as a spousal joint enterprise should be evaluated in light of the absence of an explicit price system within the family. There are no explicit prices to compensate spouses for their respective inputs as managers of the family unit’, schrijven de twee auteurs (p. 419).
Zij vervolgen: ‘Within the family, just as in any collective enterprise, there is a division of labor between the spouses. Such division is the rational consequence of economies derived from specialization and will obtain even in the absence of an initial comparative advantage of one spouse in the production of family services’ (p. 419-420). Even verder heet het: ‘The divergence between private and social (i.e. family) incentives is exacerbated by the possibility of dissolution of the family union upon the request of one spouse. In the absence of legal rules regulating the “pathological” phase of marriage, each subject will set his or her own value of input in such a way as to equalize marginal private costs and benefits’ (p. 420).
En zij besluiten dit hoofdstuk aldus: ‘In this setting, the legal regime of the family patrimony can be viewed as designed as a remedy to the risk of ex post opportunism of spouses with a finite horizon of individual optimization. This explains why the increased importance of the economic regime of the family is a necessary by-product of the historical decline of the dogma of indissolubility of the family union’ (ibidem).
Verfrissende lectuur als men de – met excuus aan de auteurs – degelijke doch saaie Nederlandstalige hand- en studieboeken over dit thema ter hand of in studie neemt. Het illustreert dat de rechtseconomie – soms – een aardige alternatieve blik op rechtsverschijnselen kan werpen.
Deze column is eerder verschenen in Ars Aequi september 2008