THE DEATH AS A LEGAL FACT

Abstract

The subject of research of this paper is death as a legal fact – an event that leads to
the termination of the legal subjectivity of a natural person, but at the same time it causes
numerous legal consequences in civil law relations: property law, obligations and inheritance
law. In the paper it is emphasized that passive legal capacity lasts for the entire life of a person,
from birth to death. When death occurs a person not only ceases to exist physically, but also
stops being a subject in law. From a legal perspective the termination of a person’s legal
capacity leads to the termination of all rights related to him or her. The paper demonstrates
that one of the basic tasks of science is to determine the exact moment of death. The process
of determining death, as a legal fact, is a topic of medical sciences. Among other things, the
paper points to the medical scientific views that make a clear distinction between the different
types of physical death (coma, cerebral, clinical and biological) which are analyzed in great
detail in this paper.