Institute of Inheritance Contract in the Civil Law of Russia

There are a number of problems caused by the introduction of the inheritance contract into the Russian legal order. The research's main aim is to identify the controversial issues concerning this institution and suggest some reasonable amendments. It is expected to determine the contract's legal nature and demarcate it from the constructions with the same goals, such as a will. Furthermore, the content of the inheritance would be analyzed to reveal legal gaps and ambiguous general norms to justify the idea that the balance of parties’ interests does not provided for by the current regulation. The methodology is chosen in order to investigate legislation, doctrine and case law properly. It primarily includes analytical, prognostic and case study methods. As a result of the study, it was found that the inheritance contract is a sui generis legal construction. Its key difference from a will is that the latter is a unilateral deal, while an inheritance contract is a bilateral or multilateral one. It is distinguished from a standing right agreement by the moment of transfer of a title: respectively, the moment of commencement of succession or the moment of concluding an agreement. The non-transferability of rights from the inheritance contract, provided for by law, necessitates a preliminary provision for the option of substitution of heirs. The construction of a joint inheritance agreement of spouses is a combination of an inheritance contract and a joint will. However, due to its complexity and dependence on a number of factors, it is expected extremely complicate to implement in practice. Furthermore, the duties of the heir can be divided into extra-hereditary and arising in the order of inheritance. The former, in contrast to the latter, are not limited by the amount of the mass of the succession, which determines the element of aleatory inheritance contract. Moreover, an inheritance contract may not contradict the rules of a legitimate portion, however, in the case of forced heirs, a rule of the proportional reduction of the heir's obligation is provided for. It is assumed that this rule would also act retroactively if the testator did not notify the conventional heir about the presence of forced heirs. Another element of the aleatory nature of the inheritance contract is that the testator can freely dispose of his property, even if it is the subject of the contract. It seems that this particular provision of the Russian Civil Code needs to be corrected in the first place. The provisions on the dynamics of the inheritance agreement contain a number of gaps: the issue of compensation for losses in case of unilateral cancellation of the agreement has not been prescribed in detail, criteria for violation of the rights of third party by an inheritance agreement have not been established. It is assumed that these issues will be resolved in the future by judicial practice. In general, it seems that the current version of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation does not provide the proper level of attractiveness of the inheritance agreement for potential counterparties, basically, because the balance of interests of the parties is violated. It is necessary to prepare a number of amendments to certain provisions of the law in order to eliminate the regulatory problems.