Pravni Zapisi (Jan 2019)
Testament as inheritance from Roman law
Abstract
Every person is a bearer, a titular, of certain subjective property rights and obligations throughout his life. The death results in a physical person's ceasing to exist, however, although it is theoretically possible for all his rights and obligations to cease with death, in practice, it is usually different, so that they generally remain after death. First and foremost, they are rights and obligations of property and therefore all legal systems contain rules on the inheritance of rights and obligations in case of death. Roman law is the foundation of hereditary law, in the sense that the institute of the will in its present form appears for the first time in Law XII tables and as such continues to live through the practice of the next two and a half thousand years. This paper aims to point out the significance of the testament and the terms close to it. It was concluded that the testament and the main concepts concerning it, such as: the descendant, the heir, the hereditary, the universal and the singular succession, are not losing any significance after more than two millennia. All of this contributes to legal certainty and allows holders of property rights to believe in the institute of the testament that after their death their property rights will continue to exist the way they want it.
