Das Internationale Privatrecht im neuen Zivilgesetzbuch Puerto Ricos - Abkehr vom common law

Private International Law in Puerto Rico’s New Civil Code – Farewell to Common Law. Puerto Rico enacted a new civil code in 2020 the introductory title to which regulates private international law. The code, which supersedes the earlier Civil Code of 1902/1930, was over twenty years in the making. The code it replaced was rooted in the country’s Spanish heritage but overlain by common law principles, as the island of Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since 1898. It was against this common law influence that the reform movement arose that led to the creation of the new Civil Code. Article 1 of the Code postulates Puerto Rico’s membership in the civil law family of nations, declaring civilian methods of finding and interpreting the law to be the exclusively binding approach. The same approach is taken to private international law, which was the subject of great controversy during the consultations in advance of the new code. Late in the consultations, a new chapter on „Conflicto de Leyes“ was drafted that takes up elements from various sources but never arrives at a unified synthesis and shows signs of lingering editorial uncertainty. It is a heterogenous body of rules that calls for jurisprudence to build a logically consistent system out of, even as Article 1 of the Civil Code forbids any resort to common law principles.