Politics and Inheritance Law. Endeavours to Keep Classical Rules of Inheritance Law in the Polish Civil Code

Abstract

After the Second World War the Polish authorities used the inheritance law as a political instrument to shape and consolidate the socialist system. The influence of ideology and politics on Polish inheritance law was especially visible during the works on codification of civil law in the period from 1947 to 1964. Firstly, article presents a brief look at the evolution of inheritance law in Bolshevik Russia and the USSR. The author depicts attempts at implementation of the Soviet model to the Polish inheritance law in three areas: the group of statutory heirs, freedom of testation and in the reserve system. In all those areas endeavours to keep classical rules of civil law were undertaken. Most representatives of the doctrine were able to bypass the political conditions in order to keep a high legal standard. The author strives to show how the scholars tried to preserve the classical inheritance law institutions by manipulating the political doctrine. By ideological justifications of the proposed legal solutions, in fact they enabled to keep in the Civil Code of 1964 most of the basic inheritance law rules of former regulation from 1946. Further remarks are devoted to the changes in inheritance of farms. Determination of authorities in conducting the new agricultural policy caused submission of inheritance regulations to the aim of increasing agricultural production.