re: Should govt. be completely out of the marriage/family business?

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My next question would be whether or not this was an exceptionally rare period of secular marriage law or was it merely one example of many in the ancient (and not so Ancient) world?

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In all fairness - Justinian was really an Eastern Empire thing - after the fall of the West - and there was lots of Christian stuff plugged into the code itself, but, at that time, the authority of the Constintinople Patriarch in matters of religion was unquestioned and Eastern Emporers tended to function as purely secular rulers.

But, at the end of the western empire, marriage was, effectively, a secular institution as well.