Смртта како правен факт

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.