Innovations in the Family Legislation of the Russian Federation: Analysis of the Legislative Initiatives and Law Enforcement Trends

Introduction: the transformation and evolution of modern society, its values, and its priorities are simultaneously evidenced in fairly sustainable and stable social institutions, which include family and marriage. The multifaceted issues of demography, the family, the transmission of the cultural code, and spiritual heritage through generations currently occupy a central place in state policy – the year of 2024 has been declared the year of the family in Russia. The Russian legislator is carefully and delicately introducing changes in family law, dictated by established judicial practice and aimed at consolidating positive trends (in particular, the protection of paternity as part of alimony obligations), avoiding radical innovations (such as, for example, the introduction of the right to freedom of gender/sexual self-determination). At the same time, the events taking place in the country and disturbing the usual way of life are a powerful factor affecting the family and social condition. The purpose of the study is to identify the reaction of the legislator and law enforcer to the paradigmatic transformation of family and marital relations. Methods: the methodological framework for the study is a set of methods of scientific cognition, whose main ones are analysis, synthesis, generalization, and comparative jurisprudence. Results: the current state of the institution of marriage is characterized by the formation of a new type of family and the construction of new models of marriage, which entails the need to modernize the established legal foundations in this area, whose outline we can observe in the scientifically based concepts and supported by various state development programs. We can observe innovations in marital relations both in the proposed legislative initiatives and in the emerging judicial practice. Conclusions: in modern realities, the law enforcer is faced with such negative phenomena as sham marriages, putative marriages, and putative termination of marital relations, where the parties determine their sociolegal status based on material interest, without pursuing goals arising from the nature of marital relations. According to the author, the legislative initiative on the recognition of actually existing marital relations in a judicial application procedure at the request of one of the parties is aimed at undermining the basic principle of marriage – the mutual expressed consent of both persons wishing to marry. The transformations considered in the marriage sphere allow believing that the special military operation has also played an important role in this process, which has changed the views of many people on the meaning of marriage and its key principles.