USUCAPTION AS A MEANS OF ACQUIRING THE OWNERSHIP TITLE
USUCAPTION AS A MEANS OF ACQUIRING THE OWNERSHIP TITLE

Summary/Abstract: According to the Civil Code in force, the ownership title may be acquired, according to law, by convention, legal or testamentary inheritance, accession, usucaption, as effect of the good-faith possession in case of movable assets and fruits, by occupation, tradition, as well as by court decision, when it is not conveyancing by itself. Moreover, according to the law, the ownership title may also be acquired by to the effect of an administrative act, and the law may further regulate other means of acquiring the ownership title. Therefore, the usucaption is that modality of acquiring the ownership title and other main real rights by exercising an uninterrupted possession over an asset, within the term and under the conditions provided for by the legislation in force. In Romanian modern law, referred to as acquisitive prescription, usucaption was first regulated in the Civil Code adopted on 1864, which stipulated two types, i.e.: short-term usucaption, of 10 to 20 years and long-term usucaption, of 30 years. The institution of usucaption is justified, in relation to the situation of the owner, as the need for stability of the situations and of the legal relations imposes, at a certain time and subject to compliance with certain conditions provided for by the law, the acknowledgment of certain legal effects to the long appearance of property, until transforming a situation de facto in a situation de jure. Concurrently, as the courts also considered, in justifying the institution of usucaption one cannot put aside the situation of the former owner, meaning that, indirectly, the usucaption is also a sanction against the former owner’s passivity, who waived his own good and has not been interested in it for a long time, leaving it in the possession of another person who behaved as owner or as holder of another main real right. Depending on the nature of the asset susceptible of usucaption, the usucaption may be of two main types: immovable usucaption and movable usucaption. In its turn, immovable usucaption may be extra-tabular immovable usucaption and immovable tabular usucaption. As one will establish during the study, the extra-tabular usucaption operates in favor of the holder of the asset representing the subject of an ownership title over an immovable asset that was not registered with the land register, tabular immovable usucaption operates in the favor of a person who is registered in the land register as the rightful onwer of a key immovable property right, only if the registration was maded without “legitimate grounds”.

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