Lex Succesionis – the Determination of Applicable Law of Inheritance in Private International Law

Abstract

The physical death of man leads, from a legal point of view, to the loss of the status of subject of law, but his patrimony, rights and obligations of patrimonial character, remain. Also, the deceased traditionally enjoys a certain respect, being protected, meaning that there was talk of a right of corpses to protect the privacy of their own image, a right to their integrity, a right to peace of last place and a right to respect for the memory of the deceased. The Civil Code in Articles 78 to 81 expressly provides for the regulation of rules likely to protect the non-patrimonial rights of the deceased person under the name of „Respect due to the person and after his death”. Thus, according to art. 80 paragraph (Lupaşcu, 2012, p. 112) of the Civil Code: „any person may determine his own funeral and may dispose of his body after death. In the case of those who do not have the capacity to exercise or those who have a limited capacity to exercise, the written consent of the parents or, as the case may be, of the guardian is also required”. Without the regulations regarding the respect of the natural person and after his death being irrelevant, the regulations regarding the fate of the deceased person's patrimony are much wider and more complex, making up the matter of successions. In art. 953 C. Civ, the inheritance is defined as the transmission of the patrimony of a deceased natural person to one or more persons in existence. The current Civil Code often uses the notion of inheritance, but the notion of succession has the same meaning, except that it is used less often.