Familie und Personenstand: Die zunehmende Bedeutung des Personenstandswesens

Family and Personal Status: The Increasing Importance of Civil Status Registration. This article focuses on the civil status registration system, an area of public administration whose central task is to record as completely as possible important life events of citizens - birth, marriage, the establishment of a registered partnership, and death. In many jurisdictions, the civil registrars thereby engage in public enforcement of otherwise private family status laws. The registry offices not only record the facts relevant for civil status but also certify parentage, marriage and partnership, name and gender as legal status relationships based on family law and the law of natural persons. This paper aims to show that certain recent developments have increased the importance of civil status registration, but so far the consequences of this increase have not always been sufficiently recognized, neither in legal policy nor in legal academia.