Contractual Acquisition of Real Estate Ownership

Charter of Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms of the Czech Republic guarantees each person a right to own property. However, to protect this fundamental right, a secondary legislation must state which things can be refered to as property and which ways to create the ownership are legally relevant. Civil law of the nowaday Czech Republic has gone through a significant history. As to a part of the Austrian Empire, the later Austro-Hungarian Empire, the austrian legislation had been applied in the lands of former Kingdom of Bohemia and here it remained in force even after the fall of Austro-Hungarian Empire, when a new country, the Czechoslovakia, was formed. The regulation contained in the Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (ABGB), in other words the austrian Civil Code of 1811, was built mostly on Roman law basis. Such an influence can be exhibited e.g. on the provisions about things in legal sense and their divisions or about the ownership of things and means of its creation. In the lands of former Kingdom of Bohemia, the ABGB stayed in use until 1950, when it was succeeded by a new Civil Code. The Civil Code of 1950 was a result of only two year long process of recodification, that should create new rules for a new system based on the idea of socialism, leaving the Roman law principles behind...