Marriage

===Property regime===
In many countries today, each marriage partner has the choice of keeping his or her property [[community property|separate]] or combining properties. In the latter case, called [[community property]], when the marriage ends by divorce each owns half. In lieu of a [[Will and testament|will]] or [[trust law|trust]], property owned by the deceased generally is inherited by the surviving spouse.

In some legal systems, the partners in a marriage are "jointly liable" for the debts of the marriage. This has a basis in a traditional legal notion called the "Doctrine of Necessities" whereby, in a heterosexual marriage, a husband was responsible to provide necessary things for his wife. Where this is the case, one partner may be sued to collect a debt for which they did not expressly contract. Critics of this practice note that debt collection agencies can abuse this by claiming an unreasonably wide range of debts to be expenses of the marriage. The cost of defense and the burden of proof is then placed on the non-contracting party to prove that the expense is not a debt of the family. The respective maintenance obligations, both during and eventually after a marriage, are regulated in most [[jurisdiction]]s; [[alimony]] is one such method.