Wealth Transfer Laws in 153 Jurisdictions: An Empirical Comparative Law Approach

• Author: Yun-chien Chang
• Position: Research Professor & Director of Center for Empirical Legal Studies, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. J.S.D.
• Pages: 1915-1944

1915

Wealth Transfer Laws in 153 Jurisdictions:

An Empirical Comparative Law Approach

Yun-chien Chang*

ABSTRACT: Wealth trans fer doctrines have never before been com pared on

a large scale. Using a unique hand-coded data set on property doctrines that

I compiled over five years, this Article describes the fol lowing doctrines in 153

jurisdictions: whether the jurisdictio n recognizes any future interest; whether

real estate registration is absolute (public faith principle); whether in sales of

real estate registration is necessa ry, or create opposability to third parties;

whether a real agreement is conc eptually separate from the sale co ntract and

whether an invalid sale contract will al ways cause the invalidity of the real

agreement (non-causa principle); and w hether delivery or certain intentions

are required to transfer ownership of perso nal properties or the sale contract

itself is sufficient. Further us ing clustering analysis, this Arti cle categorizes

the wealth transfer doctrines of the 153 jurisdict ions into eight groups,

finding that China, Russia, and Sco tland are the outliers, and English,

French, and German influences on many jurisdictions are obvious.

* Research Professor & Director of Center for Empirical Legal Studies, Institutum

Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. J.S.D., New York University School of Law. Email:

kleiber@sinica.edu.tw. I would like to thank my Research Assistants (“RAs”) over five years from

Taiwan, Peru, New Zealand, India, Israel, Colombia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Uganda,

Turkey, France, and South Africa. They are Winnie Awino, Harika Bakaraju, Gahli B erger,

Paloma Carreno, Jung-Han Chang, Danlin Chang, Gina Chavarry, Chih-jui Chen, Tzu-Yuan Chu,

Yichen Chu, Huseyin Guzeler, Melanie Lee, Ingrid Lee, Christina Lee, Calvin Lim, Tin-jun Liu,

Hannah Musgrave, Maria Oluyeju, Anne-Line Schwint, and Daniella Weinrauch. Academia Sinica

Career Development Award (106-H02) pro vided the main funding for this project. The librarians

at the University of Chicago Law School and Cornell Law School provided great help in

identifying foreign law materials when I was a visitor there. Some of the aforementioned RAs are

Masters of Law (“LLM”) students at Chicago and Cornell. The University of Chicago Law School

also covered the expenses for the LLM RAs. The Law Library at University of Iowa College of Law

also provided me with foreign legal materials when I was the library’s Bonfield Fellow for 2016.

Professor XU Guodong, though we have never met in person, allowed me to Xerox his civil code

collections. Professor Nuno G aroupa helped code the property laws of former Por tugal colonies

and co-authored with me several other papers using the larger data set. Many other people have

helped in making this giganti c coding project possible. I am grate ful to all of them. For comments

on prior manuscripts, I am thankful for hel pful comments from Aurore Chaigneau, Chung-Wu

Chen, Pierre Crocq, Thomas Gallanis, John Reitz, and Tzung-Mou Wu.

1916 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 103:1915

I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 1916

II. UNIQUE DATA ON PROPERTY LAW IN 153 JURISDICTIONS .......... 1918

III. DESCRIPTIONS OF AND REFLECTION ON WEALTH

TRANSFER DOCTRINES AROUND THE WORLD ............................ 1920

A. FUTURE INTERESTS .............................................................. 1920

B. TITLE TRANSFER RULE FOR REAL PROPERTIES ....................... 1925

C. PUBLIC FAITH PRINCIPLE ..................................................... 1929

D. TITLE TRANSFER RULES FOR PERSONAL PROPERTIES .............. 1932

IV. LEGAL FAMILIES REGARDING WEALTH TRANSFER LAWS ............ 1941

V. CONCLUSION ............................................................................ 1944

I. INTRODUCTION

Traditional comparative law research has been conducted on a small

scale. Scholars choose their country of interest and compare it with one or a

few other countries. The endeavor is usually normative—drawing on other

countries’ experience to justify adopting or giving up certain legal doctrines

or interpretations. Comparative law is sometimes positive but seldom

empirical.1 A notable exception is the law and finance literature started by

Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert

Visney (collectively called LLSV), which uses data from dozens of countries to

qualitatively identify patterns of the effects of laws on economic

performances.2 Yet LLSV’s finding that the legal origins (common versus civil

law) matter has been heavily criticized, partly due to its casual classification of

1. For an overview of empirical comparative law works and reflection on the methodology,

see generally Holger Spamann, Empirical Compa rative Law, 11 ANN. REV. L. & SOC. SCI. 131 (2015);

Holger Spamann, Large-Sample, Quantitative Research Designs for Comparative Law?, 57 AM. J. COMP.

L. 797 (2009).

Most empirical comparative law scholarship is about constitutional law. See, e.g., Jerg Gutmann et

al., Determinants of Constitutionally Safeguarded Judicial Review: Insights Based on a New Indicator,

in EMPIRICAL LEGAL ANALYSIS: ASSESSING THE PERFORMANCE OF LEGAL INSTITUTIONS 216, 216–54

(Yun-chien Chang ed., 2014); Tom Ginsburg et al., When to Overthrow Your Government: The Right

to Resist in the World’s Constitutions, 60 UCLA L. REV. 1184, 1217–28 (2013); Tom Ginsburg & Mila

Versteeg, Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?, 30 J.L. ECON. & ORG. 587, 597–613

(2013); David S. Law & Mila Versteeg, The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution,

87 N.Y.U. L. REV. 762, 768–70 (2012); David S. Law & Mila Versteeg, Sham Constitutions, 101 CAL.

L. REV. 863, 886–92 (2013).

2. See generally Rafael La Porta et al., The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins, 46 J. ECON.

LITERATURE 285 (2008) [hereinafter LLSV, Legal Origins] (rev iewing follow-up studies and

responding to critiques); Rafael La Porta et al., Law and Finance, 106 J. POL. ECON. 1113 (1998)

[hereinafter LLSV, Law and Finance] (using empirical data to examine how the legal origins of

49 countries impact their economic growth).