Dve strany jednej mince – úbohá alebo veselá vdova? Právne postavenie vdovy v súkromnom práve konca 19. a v prvej polovice 20. storočia na území Slovenska

Abstract

The study introduces the peculiarities of the private law status of the widow in Hungarian law and subsequently in Czechoslovak law, specifically in the legal sphere of Slovakia and Carpatian Ruthenia. It notes the respect and preservation of traditionalism in the view of the originally medieval institution of widow’s law and the efforts to gradually transform its content and scope (also in the draft of the Hungarian Civil Code of 1900). The study had to deal with the specific nature of the sources – the basis of the widow’s private law status was in fact the provisions of the Provisional Judicial Rules of the Judicial Conference (1861), legal custom, established judicial practice and only partial statutory regulation. The failure of codification efforts in the field of Hungarian civil law and the subsequent reception of the law into the Czechoslovak legal order led to the preservation of this platform of sources of law – and thus also certain relics of medieval law – in the law in force in the territory of Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. The study approaches the widow through her broadly understood widow’s right (ius viduale), competing with the husband’s legal heirs, and its place in the period of constructed modernity.