Reflections on the Circulation of Normative Models and Legal Works in the 1936 Argentine Civil Code Draft on Possession
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Abstract
This article explores the process of circulation of normative models and legal theories between Europe and Latin America. It analyzes the circulation of the German possessory model in the Argentinian legal experience between the enactment of the Civil Code of 1869 and the Civil Code Draft of 1936. We argue that the prominence of possession in nineteenth-century local legal culture and practices both conditioned and encouraged the reception of this model. The criticisms that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century regarding the liberal property law of the Civil Code were channelled, in the Civil Code Draft of 1936, through an expansion of the protection of possession to situations not previously contemplated, such as rural and urban leaseholds. German law, which served among other things, as the basis for this legal innovation, was adapted to specific legal traditions operating in provincial regulations.
Contributor Notes
María Rosario Polotto holds a PhD in law from the Catholic University of Argentina, where she teaches legal history. She also teaches at the University of Buenos Aires. Her research interests include legal history and private law, especially the history of codification and the circulation of legal ideas in Latin America. She is currently coordinating a research project on codification and constitutionalism during the first half of the twentieth century. She has been a Doctoral Fellow at the Legal History Research Institute and a Researcher at the Max Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is a Member of Instituto de Historia del Derecho (INHIDE) and an Editorial Board Member of the journal Revista de Historia del Derecho. Email: mariapolotto@uca.edu.ar
Pamela Alejandra Cacciavillani is a lawyer (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba- Argentina), Magister (Università degli Studi di Messina, Università degli Studi di Milano, Universidad de Córdoba-Spain), and PhD in Law and Social Sciences (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba-Argentina). She was a Doctoral Candidate and Researcher at the Max Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) between 2013 and 2019. She has been a Guest Lecturer at the Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät-Universität Zürich (2019) and at the Universidad Autonomá de Madrid (2022). She has also been invited by the University of Buenos Aires (2021) to collaborate in postgraduate courses. From 2019 until 2022, she was a full time Professor of History of Legal Institutions (University of Monterrey) and a National Researcher Candidate of the National System of Researchers CONACYT (2020–2022). In 2022, she was promoted to National Researcher Level 1 by the National System of Researchers CONACYT (2023–2027). Since 2022, she has been the Director of the Academic Law Department of the University of Monterrey (UDEM). She specializes in the historical and feminist analysis of law with a special interest in property and land registry issues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Email: pamela.cacciavillani@udem.edu.mx