Civil Code of Argentina - Laws of Errata

Laws of Errata

The first law of Errata was the law No. 527, that sanctioned what the Executive could propose for the new edition of the Civil College New York law, which could introduce a correction of 24 titles.

This was necessary because when the first copies of this edition arrived in the country at the end of 1870, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's opposition took advantage of the modifications in the legal code sanctioned by Congress to initiate a media campaign against the government. For this reason Victorino de la Plaza and Aurelio Prado were appointed to compare both versions and report on the existing differences. While they were doing so, on 1 January 1871 President Sarmiento's decree declared the Buenos Aires edition to be official.

In August of that year, Dr. de la Plaza and Dr. Prado reported that they had found 1,882 differences between the two texts, but due to the intrascendencia of many of these alterations, they concluded that the new edition of the code was not contrary to that sanctioned by Congress.

However, public opinion was not amiable with this solution, as it declared official a text only nominally approved by the Congress and had a great amount of misprints besides. This last problem was what the senator for Tucumán Benjamín Paz prepared to rectify, by means of a law project presented in 1878 that noticed 29 new errors. As this project passed through the commissions of the Chambers of Deputies and Senators, the number grew up as far as 285. This 285 errors are the ones that the Law No. 1196 corrects, sanctioned August 29 of 1882, commonly known as the Law of Errata, though it was the second of its kind to be sanctioned.

But all the corrections were not limited to merely formal adjustments: some of them introduced changes in the doctrine of the Civil Code edited by Vélez Sársfield. This is the case of the alteration introduced in the article 325, in whom it was added as a requisite sine qua non the state of natural son to start an action of paternity after the father's death:

"The natural children have the right to be recognised by the father of mother, or to be declared as such by the judge, when the parents denied them as being their children, admitting in the paternity of maternity investigation all the proofs that are admitted to prove the facts, and that concur to demonstrate the natural paternity. Not being in the possession of this state, this right can only be exercised by the children during the lifes of the parents" —Argentine Civil Code, article 325 before its modification by the Law No. 24.779

The Law 1,196 also established the making of a new edition that included the corrections stated in that law. Abiding that disposition, in 1883 the third edition of the Civil Code was made, known as The Pampa edition for the name of the workshop who did the printing. This edition includes an important modification, being that the articles are number as whole.

In 1900, President Julio A. Roca ordered a new edition that eliminated the articles revoked by the Civil Marriage Law and introduced the new dispositions without altering the numbering of the non-modified articles. At the end of the task, the project was sent to the national government, who in turn passed it to the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires to examine it. The Faculty designated a commission, who after the investigation determined that the project introduced reforms in the law doctrine. After asking for a competence extension, the Commission proposed this modifications in 1903, although the project was never dealt with by the Congress.