Creditor protection in succession law: advantages & disadvantages of civil and common law legal systems - Juan Pablo Murga Fernández

Hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law

Professor Juan Pablo Murga Fernández (Universidad de Sevilla)

About the speaker
Juan Pablo Murga Fernández is a Senior Lecturer of Civil Law at the University of Seville, where he teaches contract law, property law, family and succession law to undergraduate students and different courses on the LLM in Private Law. He is Professor of Comparative Property and Succession Law at Florida International University, in their ‘Summer Study Abroad Programme’. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow of the Institute of European and Comparative Law of the University of Oxford and is currently ‘Simon Visiting Professor’ at the University of Manchester, where he teaches European comparative contract law and European comparative property law.

His research focuses on contract law, property law, comparative succession law and data protection. He is currently working on a book exploring the payment of debts in succession law from a European comparative perspective.

About the seminar
The transfer of the deceased’s debts is a common consequence that arises from the phenomenon of succession in both civil and common law legal systems. In this respect, a number of conflicting interests are at stake: namely, the interest of the beneficiaries that need to be balanced against the interests of the different groups of creditors (the ones of the estate and those of the beneficiaries). Common law legal systems are generally considered as the most creditor friendly, for beneficiaries only receive the residue once the estate is fully winded up. By contrast, civil law legal systems are characterized by the dogma of fusion of patrimonies, where the estate is fused with the beneficiary’s patrimony. Taking these aspects into account, the presentation will analyse how creditors’ interests are protected in the most representative European succession laws belonging to the common and civil law legal traditions, with a view to identifying their main advantages and disadvantages.

This event is free and open to all. No registration necessary.