Prescription of the Decedent’s Debts, Dating From the Time of Old Austrian Civil Code From 1811 (ABGB) in Slovenia and Croatia

Abstract

The establishment of the first Yugoslav state in 1918 was, from a legal point of view, the merger of six quite different legal traditions into one common state formation, and did not bring with it immediate legal unification, which was most evident in the field of civil law. Austrian Civil Code (ABGB) of 1811, as an interesting and endurable sub-type of transnational law, governed almost exclusively, with minimal differences, civil law in most of the territory of the present-day Slovenia and Croatia. Its legal rules survived the Second World War and were applied well into the late 1970s, in part even until the enactment of the new Slovene Code of Obligations in 2002 and the Croatian Obligations Act in 2005. However, since ABGB as a source of law has never been definitively abrogated, its legal rules are still applicable for deciding disputes in both countries, even in the case of the liability of heirs for the deceased’s debts, if the related contract of delivery was concluded as far back as 1960.