Alimony and compensatory allowance: a required distinction

Abstract

Alimony is based on the doctrine of solidarity between family members. This rationale comes from the duty of assistance, which is mutual among people who have family ties of kinship, marriage, or civil union. Recently in Brazil, scholars have proposed a new kind of “obligation” between former spouses and partners, which has been granted by courts as a “compensatory provision”, ordinarily and mistakenly called “compensation alimony”. In this sense, there is a strong debate on the legal nature of compensatory allowance, which was not clearly established in the Brazilian law and therefore, its ground is controverse. Having said that, this paper aims to identify the nature of the compensatory allowance in order to verify the (im)possibility of its granting by courts.