Arturo Pérez, a law alumni from UIC Barcelona, presented his doctoral thesis titled “La interpel·lació a l’anomenat-hereu en dret civil català i la seva repudiació en cas de silenci” (The demand of the legitimate heir in Catalan civil law and their repudiation in case of no response) at the University on 18 September. In their thesis the notary asks why Catalan law, in the particular subject of term and demand for payment from legitimate heirs regulated in Article 461-12 of the Civil Code of Catalonia, has established a different result from the rest of Spanish civil rights.

Arturo Pérez’s investigation begins with the fact that all the legal systems contain the possibility that interested parties in the inheritance process can ask the notary to request the legitimate heir to indicate whether they accept or repudiate the inheritance. “Based on the historical Catalan law and the evolution of other European civil rights, Catalan law is the only European – along with Italian civil law – that purely applies the principles of Roman Justinian law. That is to say that if they do not answer, it is understood that they reject the inheritance,” concludes the jurist.

Doctor Arturo Pérez graduated from the Faculty of Law of in 2002 and this thesis, directed by Dr Salvador Durany, ends three years of research within the Doctoral Programme in Economics and Law of UIC Barcelona.

The defence panel of the thesis was composed of Dr Mª del Carmen Gete-Alonso y Calera, of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona; Dr Ángel Serrano de Nicolás, notary and lecturer at the Pompeu Fabra University and Dr Albert Lamarca Marqués, of the Pompeu Fabra Universitat.