Powody wydziedziczenia descendentów wg Noweli 115. cesarza Justyniana
Reasons for disinheriting descendants according to emperor justinian's novel 115

Summary/Abstract: The Novel 115th, announced in 542, is a substantial element of the inheritance law reform undertaken by emperor Justinian. It introduces the highest limitations to an almost one-thousand-year-honored tradition of the freedom of testing that was legally based on the regulation of the Twelve Tables, Tab. 5,3: Uti legassit super pecunia tutelave suae rei, ita ius esto. Innovations introduced in its third and fourth chapters focus on two catalogs of justified reasons for disinheriting. The former chapter contains a catalog of fourteen reasons for disinheriting descendants. The latter one gives eight reasons for disin heriting ancestors. Justinian derives all specified reasons for exheredationis from the lack of gratitude from either descendants or ancestors. The present article is a review of the catalog of the following justified reasons for disinheriting descendants: 1) raising one's hand to strike their ancestors; 2) caus ing a serious or humiliating insult at them; 3) accusing them of having committed a public law crime (crimen) that did not harm the emperor or the state; 4) using magic; 5) making an attempt to poison or kill ancestors in another way; 6) a real relation ship of a sexual nature between a son and his stepmother or his father's concubine; 7) a denunciation of parents by their son and because of that putting them at risk of incurring serious costs; 8) a soulless refusal of male descendants to guarantee their arrested ancestors; 9) making an attempt to frustrate their ancestors' intentions to make a will; 10) joining a troupe of gladiators or mummers and doing these jobs against the ancestors' will; 11) a daughter's or granddaughter's refusal to get mar ried connected with the choice of dissolute lifestyle despite the fact that parents or grandparents dowered her appropriately; 12) neglecting ancestor-care and assistance during their mental illness; 13) neglecting to pay ransom for their captured ancestors; 14) contempt for the ancestor's catholic beliefs by practicing heresy and not main taining contacts with the Church. The analysis that was carried out shows that in the perspective of principium and paragraph 15 of Nov. 115,3 an ancestor could have disinherited a descendant only if one of the following two conditions had been fulfilled: 1) if he had given his descend ant a statutory inheritance in the form of a deed of gift, legacy, fideicommissum or in any other way; 2) if he had stated in his will at least one of the fourteen reasons for his descendant's ingratitude specified by Justinian in Nov. 115, 3. Some of them were known in the Roman law earlier although they needed further clarification, others were added to the said catalog by Justinian as they deserved it because of various reasons. Most of them referred to all the descendants. Because of the sixth or the seventh reason, the testator could disinherit only his son; because of the eighth one - every male descendant; because of the eleventh one-only a daughter or granddaughter. The character of some reasons for disinheriting limited the range of subjects who could use it; it took place in the case of the sixth one (father), the seventh one (par ents) and the eleventh one (parents and grandparents). Defining the ninth, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth reasons of descendants ingratitude, Justinian elaborated on the thread of descendants' unworthiness because of these reasons. This way he emphasized that in case of the existence of one of them. if a descendant had not been disinherited, he would have deserved being deprived of the inheritance. Making comments on the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth reasons of ingratitude, he also indicated who is to inherit instead of an unworthy descendant None of the reasons of ingratitude mentioned in the catalog, no matter how jus tifiable reason for disinheriting it would be, did not oblige a testator to disinherit an ungrateful descendant.

• Details
• Contents