ASPECTOS CIVILES DE LA NUEVA LEY DEL SUELO.

Abstract

Judicial practice shows that the influence of development rules and principles in the civil field is growing stronger and stronger. This paper endeavours to examine whether the enactment of a new national land law has resulted in any changes in the trend. The reply in general is that we are in a phase where the concepts and rules of urban development are taken into account by civil courts, although they are always adapted to typically civil parameters, such as diligence, breach of contract, error, default and supervening impossibility. Moreover, the legal variations in specific matters, such as declarations of new construction, have been ad hoc changes oriented more toward the work done by technicians, notaries and registrars than toward any actual repercussions in terms of civil law. On the other hand, in matters of surface rights, the modifications have been significant, with actual impact in civil law proceedings, although it is doubtful that civil courts are going to suddenly change their consolidated feeling about the creation of surface rights. Moreover, the law introduces new features in the term for exercising such typically civil action as the action regulated in the new article 18 of the Land Act, concerning contract cancellation due to failure to include in the contract a statement of what is sold in development terms, although we fear that said action will remain relatively ineffective in future, given its characteristics. In the rest of the civil questions related with development, we feel that the act has not introduced significant new features, and so presumably case-law will not be varying in those fields (development accords, uses under zoning, real action, etc.).