The time of the opening of an inheritance: actual questions of theory and practice

The article is devoted to research of the time of the opening of inheritance, one of the legal facts related to the opening of inheritance. The purpose of the article is the systematization of topical doctrinal studies, their comparison with the relevant Russian judicial practice and formulation of author»s scientific position. In the study, the authors used general scientific, private-scientific and special-legal scientific methods such as dialectics, analysis, synthesis, deduction, analogy, systemic and formal-legal methods.

The authors examined the changes to the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on the time of opening the inheritance, its significance for heirs and other persons; considered the problems of enforcement of these rules and the ways of their solution are proposed. As a result, based on the analysis the authors proposed ways to solve the identified problems by making changes to the Civil Code of the Russian Federation and the Tax Code of the Russian Federation. In particular, for the protection of the interests of heirs and third parties’ authors suggested to supplement the inheritance law with the rule governing the definition of the moment of death (calendar date, as well as hours, minutes and seconds). Special attention is paid to the theoretical and practical problem of simultaneous death of persons who died in different time zones. The expediency of establishing a single account of the time during determining the time of death of such persons to address the issue of uniform simultaneous death.