THE LEGAL REGULATION OF INHERITANCE OF THE KORČULA STATUTE

Abstract

The legal regulation of inheritance of the Korčula Statute is based on the elements of old Croatian and Slavic law and differs from the regulations in the statutes of other Dalmatian cities that are often the result of the influence of the Byzantine and later the Croatian-Hungarian Tripartite law. The basic characteristic of such a regulation, which Margetić refers to as a succesion descendent law, is the possibility that both male and female descendants inherit the estate of the deceased, but the male descendants have the advantage over women of the same degree of kinship, whereas according to Croatian-Hungarian law, women could not inherit their father’s real estate. Furtheron, the paper points out the differences regarding the legal foundations of the inheritance stipulated by the Korčula statute and other important statutes of the Dalmatian cities, and it pays particular attention to the married women’s inheritance position in terms of the disposition of their personal goods, i.e. dowry.