Pursuant to Art. 940 of the Civil Code (Act of April 23, 1964 – i.e. Journal of Laws of 2022, item 1360, as amended), the legislator provided for a situation in which during the life of both spouses one of them brought an action for separation through the fault of the other spouse. However, before the ruling in the case was made, the defendant spouse died and his property is subject to the rules of statutory inheritance.
As is known, the entry into all the rights and obligations of the testator in this way is provided for in Polish law in the event that the deceased did not leave a valid will or when he appointed the testator only to a part of the inheritance. Statutory inheritance also applies when the heir, due to inability to inherit, cannot accept the inheritance or does not want to accept it. Of course, it must be borne in mind that using the institution of substitution or increment will disable the path to inheritance according to statutory rules.
Nevertheless, the subject of this study is not the regulation relating to the methods of acquiring inheritance, but the issue on the borderline of family law and inheritance law, i.e. the issue of excluding from inheritance a spouse whose spouse died during the separation proceedings due to the fault of the defendant. Firstly, it should be remembered that as a result of the claimant’s death, the process is discontinued, as a result of which the court does not order the spouses to separate if one of them dies before the sentence is passed. However, it is possible to apply to the defendant the institution in the form of conviction, which in turn leads to the launch of a specific sanction, which is the exclusion from inheritance of the deceased spouse. The judgment in which the court makes such a decision is a consequence of an application from an heir who inherits by statute with the defendant spouse. The time limit for bringing an action is six months from the date on which the heir learned about the opening of the estate, but no more than one year from the opening of the estate. As indicated by the Supreme Court in the judgment of April 12, 2002 (the judgment of the Supreme Court of April 12, 2002, I CKN 1345/99, LEX No. 55556), the time limits specified in Art. 940 § 2 of the Civil Code belong to the category of tight deadlines. The lapse of such time-limits entails the expiry of a time-limited entitlement. In the opinion of the Supreme Court, the possibility of applying the provisions on the limitation of property claims to such time limits (Art. 117 et seq. CC) is, in the opinion of the Supreme Court, controversial. The court does not decide unequivocally on this issue, but emphasizes that with regard to the time limits specified in Art. 940 § 2 of the Civil Code there are no arguments for allowing such a possibility. Against such
On the other hand, according to the adjudicating panel, the action is justified by the fact that the order of inheritance should be determined and definitively as soon as possible.
Summarizing the above, it is necessary to conclude about the purposeful action of the legislator, which takes into account the actual relations between spouses. Thus, it prevents a situation in which the property of the deceased spouse would be unjustly transferred to the other spouse who was guilty of the breakdown of the marriage. Polish inheritance law makes the position of the spouse-heir clearly strong, taking it into account at three levels of statutory inheritance out of the five distinguished by the doctrine. Art. 940 of the Civil Code is supposed to eliminate the potential contradiction of inheritance with the principles of social coexistence. It should be remembered, however, that the court should always check whether the request of the spouse bringing the legal separation suit was justified, which is clearly emphasized by the legislator in § 1 of the above-mentioned art.