A Comparative Perspective on the Concept of Ownership in Russian Law: From the Svod Zakonov to the 1994 Civil Code

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Raff ◽  
Anna Taitslin

The modern European unitary conception of ownership emerged from the dissolution of feudalism and achievement of a deeper understanding of Roman law to become an ideal of property law in the European Civil-Law tradition. Prior to its dissolution European feudalism represented hierarchies of legal tenure in land, such as the division of land ownership between dominus directus (direct owner) and dominus utilis (beneficial owner) and overlapping hierarchies of social class descending from monarchy and aristocracy to bonded serfdom. Support for the resolution of divided land ownership and victory for the unitary concept of ownership was found in the Roman law tradition. The dissolution of feudal hierarchies took different historical courses in the legal traditions that we now identify as the French, German, Common-Law and Russian legal systems and with great local variation even within those emergent traditions. The unitary concept of ownership is found today in the French and German Civil Codes and is for practical purposes reflected in the prevalence of the common-law tenure of freehold. In Russia the systemized digest of the laws of the Russian Empire, the Svod Zakonov of 1832, provided no civil-law notion of divided ownership or perpetual rights. In the Soviet era exclusive state ownership of land and the means of production was also viewed as unitary, which raised serious questions about how state agencies and enterprises could engage in transactions with their assets and products. Venediktov’s celebrated doctrine of the right of operative management, codified in the Civil Code of the rsfr of 1964, provided legal recognition of de facto proprietary rights for state enterprises. This introduced a form of divided ownership ‘on the ground’ despite the dogma of unitary state ownership. This reality further manifested itself in widespread division of ownership between land and buildings. The Civil Code of the Russian Federation of 1994 retained and even extended some of these solutions that relied on split or divided ownership. This might have been a pragmatic way forward in the early 1990s, however twenty years later the demands of a modern sophisticated legal system require a policy trajectory back toward a modern European unitary conception of ownership. The Russian Civil Code thus should be extended in this direction.

1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.


Author(s):  
Miao Chungang

In the history of civil law, the residence right system, as a representative of human servitude, originated from Roman law and continued to develop in the "French Civil Code" and "German Civil Code". Based on the differences between Chinese and Western social and cultural traditions, Japanese civil law did not accept the human servitude system in the initial legal inheritance, and modern Chinese civil law also abandoned the human servitude system based on similar cultural value judgments. With the major changes in social life, based on the response to real social needs, the "Civil Code of the People's Republic of China" created a system of residency rights. This article uses the comparative method to study the historical evolution of the housing rights system, and explore the legal and cultural roots behind the establishment of the system. At the same time, with the help of typical cases, it analyzes the practice of the right of residence after the promulgation of the Civil Code and discusses the legal perfection of the right of residence system. This article points out the unpaid nature of the right of residence, which can easily hinder the development and effectiveness of the right of residence system. In the future judicial practice, we need to expand the interpretation of the law, expand the scope of the right of residence, and expand the legal function of the right of residence system, so as to make full use of social resources to meet the public's housing needs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Marek Novák

It follows from the case law of the Supreme and Constitutional Court that everyone has the right to leave immovable property if they do not illegally avoid liability for non-fulfilment of their own obligations. The legal institute of dereliction has its origins in Roman law, which emphasized the free will of the owner deciding to abandon property. The dereliction of real estate according to the Civil Code in effect takes place by the legal action itself, by which the owner expresses the will to abandon the thing. Declaratory nature of property registration in the real estate cadastre might follow the recodification work in the 1920s and 1930s, as it differs from the General civil code (ABGB) regulation. Moreover, the Civil Code is influenced by socialist legislation when it transfers abandoned real estate to state ownership automatically. Although this was originally considered a measure in favour of the society, it is likely to cause difficulties. In recent years, laconic provisions of the Civil Code have provoked a discussion on the requisites of the application for the registration of state ownership in the real estate cadastre. The cadastral offices and some courts initially considered that the application must be accompanied by a consent statement from the original owner and the state, which, however, contradicts the characteristic of dereliction as a unilateral act. The Supreme Court strongly opposed this practice and interpreted the nature of dereliction in its decisions in detail.


2017 ◽  
pp. 65-89
Author(s):  
Rocky Marciano Ambar ◽  
Budi Santoso ◽  
Hanif Nur Widhiyanti

Banks in credit agreements use more standard agreements, standard contracts in 2 (two) things, (1) There is an unbalanced position between banks and debtors, banks that have a more dominant position and debtors. (2) There is an understanding of the principle of freedom of contracting and without limits. The Bank has the freedom to seek the form and content of the agreement. Code of Ethics in agreement. The provisions of the Civil Code provide types of compensation for parties. Based on the background, then for problems the problem is written (1). Does the inclusion of Article 1266 and Article 1267 of the Civil Code on the banking system have collected the principles of balance and justice. (2) What are the legal implications of the exclusion clause. The research method is normative juridical research. The result of this research is the neglect of civil law and the principle of compensation is the principle of balance. The basic principle according to Rawls is that it is unfair or more people. in the sense of "freedom of results", in other words. is the nature of the debtor in a bank credit agreement. For the legal implications of the clause that excludes Article 1266 and Article 1267 of the Civil Code concerning the right of the debtor to the debtor. Legal efforts in finding and resolving problems that cannot be made by a decision due to the imbalance of the parties in the agreement. For people who make changes, no party will be harmed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorg Sladič

Legal privilege and professional secrecy of attorneys relate to the right to a fair trial (Article 6 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)) as well as to the right to respect for private and family life (Article 8 ECHR). The reason for protecting the lawyer via fundamental rights is the protection of fundamental rights of the lawyer’s clients. All legal orders apply legal privileges and professional secrecy; however, the contents of such are not identical. Traditionally there is an important difference between common and civil law. The professional secrecy of an attorney in civil law jurisdictions is his right and at the same time his obligation based on his membership of the Bar (that is his legal profession). In common law legal privilege comprises the contents of documents issued by an attorney to the client. Professional secrecy of attorneys in civil law jurisdictions applies solely to independent lawyers; in-house lawyers are usually not allowed to benefit from rules on professional secrecy (exceptions in the Netherlands and Belgium). On the other hand, common law jurisdictions apply legal professional privilege, recognized also to in-house lawyers. Slovenian law follows the traditional civil law concept of professional secrecy and sets a limited privilege to in-house lawyers. The article then discusses Slovenian law of civil procedure and compares the position of professional secrecy in lawsuits before State’s courts and in arbitration.


Author(s):  
Roman Sabodash

The paper shows how the publication of court decisions influenced the formation of a precedent. The author reviewed scientific works devoted to research the precedent in common and continental law. The research explains that the formation of precedent in England was accompanied by development of the judgment’s reviews and their prevalence among lawyers. Of course, publication of court decisions was not a major factor in setting a precedent, but it played a significant role in this. The paper also describes facts of the publication of court decisions in Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands, as well as the admissibility of their citations at the court of cassation. The general idea of the paper is that convincing precedent exists and is used although the countries of continental law do not have a «classic» precedent. The paper gives a review of the importance of the state register of court decisions for setting a convincing precedent in Ukraine. The author analyzes the pros and cons of citing court decisions. It’s stated that, unfortunately, the quotations of court decisions is not always correct and sometimes amounts to rewriting the «right» legal position without comparing the circumstances of the case. The article concludes that the practice of applying a convincing precedent in Ukraine is only emerging and needs further improvement.          It has been found out that the publication of judgments of supreme courts is one of the factors that helped to establish precedent in common law countries. The publication of court rulings also created the conditions for a convincing precedent in civil law countries (especially in private law). At the same time, the formation of a “convincing precedent» in countries where court decisions are published in publicly available electronic court registers is much faster than in common law countries. Of course, the structure and the significance of the precedent in the common law and civil law countries are different, but one cannot dismiss that publication of court decisions as one of the factors for establishing the precedent.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Előd Bartis

The study constitutes a brief historical overview of the development of the contract of mandate, as regulated in Romanian law. Firstly, the roots of this contract in antiquity and in Roman law are discussed, and the evolution of its major characteristics are revealed. Subsequently, the author presents the regulations applicable to the contract of mandate under the first modern codifications of Romanian civil law in the Calimach and Caragea codes, the Commercial Code of Wallachia of 1840, the Romanian Civil code of 1864, the Commercial Code of 1887, and the Civil Code of 2009, currently in force. The author presents the major historic evolutions of the Romanian regulation pertinent to the nature of the contract, the parties, their remuneration, the effects of the contract inter partes and towards third persons as well as the changes in regulatory logic from the differentiation of commercial and civil mandate to the unification of the two institutions in the Civil Code of 2009.


Author(s):  
Mary Garvey Algero

Despite the fundamental differences between the doctrines employed in common law and civil law (or mixed) jurisdictions when it comes to the respect paid to prior court decisions and their weight or value, United States courts that follow the common law doctrine of stare decisis have embraced some of the flexibility inherent in the civil law doctrine, and civil law and mixed jurisdictions throughout the world, including Louisiana, that use the doctrine of jurisprudence constante seem to have come to value the predictability and certainty that come with the common law doctrine. This Article suggests that Louisiana courts are striking the right balance between valuing the predictability and certainty of interpretation that comes with a healthy respect for precedent and maintaining the flexibility and adaptability of the law by not strictly considering precedent a source of law. This Article discusses the results of an ongoing examination of the sources of law and the value of precedent in Louisiana. The examination involves a study of Louisiana legislation, Louisiana courts’ writings about the sources of law and precedent, and a survey of Louisiana judges. Part of the examination included reviewing Louisiana judicial opinions on various issues to determine if there were differences in valuing precedent based on area of law or topic. It also included reviewing judicial opinions from the United States Supreme Court and New York state courts to compare these courts’ approaches to the use of precedent with those of the Louisiana courts. The article is based on a paper presented to the Third Congress of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists, which was held in Jerusalem, Israel in June 2011, and the author’s prior writings on the subject.


Lex Russica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
E. V. Bogdanov

The existence of extraordinary circumstances, which should be understood as circumstances unavoidable under these conditions, constitutes the condition for requisition. The Civil Code of the Russian Federation gives state bodies a certain freedom in carrying out requisitions, as it is hardly possible to list all exceptional circumstances when additional equipment or other property will be required both to prevent the development of emergencies and to deal with their consequences.Civil law confiscation involves the termination of private property and the emergence of state ownership of confiscated property. Therefore, it is impossible to treat as confiscation the seizure of tengible media according to Para. 4 of Art. 1252 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, because they were produced in violation of the law and, therefore, ownership has not arisen. The paper also substantiates the conclusion that nationalization requires relevant property to come not into the property of the State, but into the national property. In the author’s opinion, the currently existing State property does not contain any hints of national property, and it can be stated that the Russian people even more than previously are removed from the property of the State and are excluded from State responsibility. Nationwide property serves as a foundation of the civil society.


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