Civil code of Argentina
In spite of the stability brought by the civil code to the Argentine law system, it was subject to various modifications throughout its history, as was necessary to adequately regulate a society undergoing significant social, political and economical changes.
The unification of the country and its political growth and strengthening demanded the codification of the civil laws, since it was not possible to continue under the uncertainty caused by the inadequate code that existed under the rule of the Spanish.
However, the revolution of September 11 of that year, which resulted in the secession of the Province of Buenos Aires from the Argentine Confederacy, prevented this project from making any concrete progress.
With the intent of fulfilling this constitutional mandate, Facundo Zuviría brought before the Senate a law that would empower the Executive Branch to appoint a commission to complete those tasks.
On October 17, 1857, a law was passed that authorized the Executive Branch to spend the necessary funds to compile the Civil, Criminal and Procedural Codes, but the initiative was ultimately frustrated.
In order of importance: Nevertheless, the Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Codes) were more often applied due to their prestige, the extension of the addressed matters, and the further knowledge of them by judges and lawyers.
[6] The primary national laws were the liberty of wombs (Libertad de Vientres) and of the slaves entering the territory (1813), the suppression of entailed states (mayorazgo) (1813) and of emphyteusis (1826), and the suppression of gentilic retract (1868), that gave the right to re-acquire family real estate sold to a stranger to the nearest relative of the original vendor (up to the 4th grade of kinship).
36, sponsored by deputy José María Cabral from Corrientes Province, was passed, which empowered the executive branch to appoint commissions in charge of writing the projects for the Civil, Penal, and Mining Codes and Military Ordinances.
For the task, Vélez Sársfield withdrew to a country house he owned, located a few kilometers from Buenos Aires city, where he wrote the drafts that his assistants transcribed.
It can only be expected that such debate will become inorganic and endless, and that in the case of the passage of proposed amendments the coherence of the general system will be ruined, through the failure to recognize that the main advantage of codifying efforts resides in the methodizing of the law, which allows the maximum usefulness to be obtained from it later.The endorsement of the Civil Code represented a great improvement over the previous legal regime, and fused modern advances in doctrine with local customs and active law.
The main influence on the work of Vélez Sarsfield was the German Romanist Friedrich Carl von Savigny with his work "System of the present Roman law" (System des heutigen römischen Rechts), used especially referring to legal entities, obligations, property and possession, and the adoption of the domicile principle as a determining element of the law, applicable to the people's marital status and capacity.
Vélez Sársfield left matrimony under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, taking the institution of canonical marriage and giving it civil effects.
[13] Finally, Vélez used 27 articles from the 1851 project for the Uruguayan Civil Code by Eduardo Acevedo Maturana, as well as some references for his notes.
According to Freitas's ideas, it is convenient to commence a Code Law by the general dispositions, then address the ones referred to the subject of every legal relation ("the theory of persons").
The presence of these notes stems from a request from the Ministry of Justice, that he annotate each article and its conformity to or divergence from laws currently in force in the country, as well as those of the major world powers.
As a result, the Code became a veritable treatise on comparative law, which proved to be quite useful, as the bibliographic material available at the end of the 19th century was not plentiful.
In this manner, for example, all the footnotes in Book IV were brought directly from the original drafts by Victorino de la Plaza without any of the pertinent modifications.
I insist that you do me this favor with all your powers so the official version be good"The printing was trusted by Sarmiento to the Argentine minister in Washington, D.C., Manuel García, while the rest of the task was given to the company Hallet Breen, who had quoted $2,000 less than other firms.
This was necessary because when the first copies of this edition arrived in the country at the end of 1870, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's opposition took advantage of the modifications in the legal code sanctioned by Congress to initiate a media campaign against the government.
In August of that year, Dr. de la Plaza and Dr. Prado reported that they had found 1,882 differences between the two texts, but due to the intrascendencia of many of these alterations, they concluded that the new edition of the code was not contrary to that sanctioned by Congress.
This last problem was what the senator for Tucumán Benjamín Paz prepared to rectify, by means of a law project presented in 1878 that noticed 29 new errors.
The rationalist notion that all law should be condensed and comprehensively written in a code was challenged by social, economic and political mutations which imposed a need for the text to be constantly updated.
Borda occupied at that moment the position of Interior minister, but that didn't stop him from contributing to the project, as the elevation note established, giving "evidence of the valuable and effective collaboration made by the minister of Interior, the doctor Guillermo A. Borda, who dedicated long hours to the deliberations (of the Commission), in spite of the multiple tasks due to the official duties of the position he currently occupies"[18] Law No.
Among the most important changes, this reform included the theory of abuse of rights, the lesion vice, the good faith principle as the rule for interpretation in contracts, the theory of unforeseenness, the limitation of the absolute character of the property, the generous repairing of moral damage in the contractual and extra-contractual civil responsibility, the possibility of reducing the compensation in the forced crimes, the solidarity of the co-authors of forced crimes, the automatic delay as a rule in obligations with deadlines, the implicit resolutory condition in contracts, the registry inscription as publicity for the transmission of property rights on real estate, the protection of third parties with good faith sub-acquirants of property or personal rights in case of nullity, the acquisition of age at 21, the emancipation by age abilitation[check spelling], the extension of the capacity of the working minor, the personal separation by joint proposal and modification of the succession order.
Although not all the doctrine agreed then with the changes made by the law, which gave it many criticisms, time proved that the reform was an important advance in the Argentine civil legislation.
The used method contains a Preliminary Title, which consists of three chapters with the general resolution, norm on private international law, and the computation of time periods.
Because of the Revolución Libertadora coup d'état, the project never reached legislative treatment, and remained inedited until 1968, when it was edited by the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán.
In 1986, the General Legislative Commission of the Chamber of Deputies created a committee for the "unification of the civil and commercial legislation", designing Héctor Alegría, Atilio Alterini, Jorge Alterini, Miguel Araya, Francisco de la Vega, Sergio Le Pera and Ana Piaggi as advisors, to whom would later join Horacio Fargosi.
The project moved on to the Senate, where a temporary commission was formed, which made several reforms, but didn't arrive to a conclusive judgement since its duration was not renovated after the originally intended six months.
At the end of 1991 the law was sanctioned with no modifications by the Senate, but later the Executive Power, considering it inadequate to the new political and economical situation, decided to veto it.
