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Vacant inheritance, heirless inheritance and claims from Warsaw Decree (part II)

The second part of the article concerns the interpretation and application in the central parts of Poland of the provisions of the Napoleonic Code on vacant inheritances. The Code does not provide a definition of the vacant inheritance. The key to the interpretation of the provisions on the acquisition of vacant inheritances by the state is the term “is presumed to be” (a vacant inheritance) used in the former Article 811 of the Napoleonic Code (French: est réputée vacante), see the current Article 809 of the French Civil Code which omits the term “is presumed to be”).This indicates that, in the absence of suitable heirs, the law introduced a specific rebuttable presumption of a vacant inheritance, belonging to the state. Only after an appropriate period of time did the presumption turn into certainty, i.e. it resulted in the inability to invoke the inheritance title. In practice, this meant that thirty years after the time necessary to draw up an inventory of the inheritance and to deliberate (ad deliberandum), the inheritance ultimately fell to the State. The mechanism adopted in the Napoleonic Code made it possible, on the one hand, for the heir to acquire the inheritance, which remained under the supervision of a curator for the period when it was presumed vacant, and on the other hand, it prevented the existence of inheritances without a claimant, i.e. inheritances devoid of the persons entitled to take them over. In the post-war period, when the communist authorities passed subsequent legal acts concerning the provisions of the inheritance law, the deadlines for heirs to apply for inheritance changed. Ultimately, the legislator did not adopt the model of vacant inheritances in the regulations harmonising the inheritance law on the Polish lands since 1947; instead, a solution analogous to the one provided for in the German Civil Code of 1986 (BGB) was adopted. The “shortening” of the statute of limitations also influenced the assessment of the admissibility of further application of the provisions of the Napoleonic Code in regard to vacant inheritances during the period of the People’s Republic of Poland regime (despite the existence of different inheritance law solutions).

