HEREDITARY AND LEGAL STATUS OF A FEMALE SPOUSE IN SERBIA FROM SERBIAN CIVIL CODE TO THE PRESENT

Abstract

At present, kinship and marital bond, as the backbone of the family organization, in most European laws, including the law of Serbia, enjoy a dominant role as the starting point and fact which are taken with equal care in forming hereditary and legal rules. However, in the times past, in a long period of legal history, the influence of the marital bond was incomparably smaller than the impact of blood relationship and quite inadequate to the objective meaning of marriage in family relations. This situation lasted for centuries, up to the adoption of modern regulations on inheritance, whereby this fact received the adequate importance, one might say, only in socialist countries. In addition, looking at the historical dimension, the particularly unfavorable status of female inheritors in domestic legislation cannot remain unnoticed. A special overview was therefore made in the paper in relation to the position of a wife as a spouse who outlived her husband, in the context of changes of her social status and accordingly the scope of her rights in relation to the scope of the rights of the testator's inheritors of the first order of succession. This is the path that went from a complete lack of recognition of wife's right to her husband's property after his death to the fully equal status with other inheritors of the first order of succession that she has at present, with certain adjustments that the legislator reserved for the testator's first instance descendants.