Civil Code of Argentina - Sanction

Sanction

Argentina had been attempting without success to join the codifying movement in vogue at that time in some of the world's most powerful nations. The creation of the code would bring several advantages to the legislation that was at that time characterized by its dispersion, and consequently, its difficult implementation. The new system would provide mainly a unity and coherence to the civil legislation, and thus it would help it to be known and applied.

There were also reasons of judicial nationalism that were motives for its creation, since it was considered necessary to reaffirm the political independence obtained decades before through legislative independence. The legislation most influential on Argentine law was until then the Spanish legislation, sanctioned centuries before, primarily because national law had minimal influence on private law.

Finally, the sanction of a code was hoped to become an efficient instrument for the consolidation of the national unity that had been expensively obtained only a few years earlier. The unification could have been damaged if the provinces had kept their own laws, or had independently sanctioned new ones to fix the inadequacies in the Spanish one instead of doing it in an unified way.

On June 6, 1863 Law N° 36, sponsored by deputy José María Cabral from Corrientes Province, was passed, which empowered the executive branch to appoint commissions in charge of writing the projects for the Civil, Penal, and Mining Codes and Military Ordinances.

Even though the law allowed for the creation of commissions of several persons, president Bartolomé Mitre decided to put a single person in charge, Dalmacio Vélez Sársfield, through a decree dated October 20, 1864.

Vélez Sársfield redacted the Project for the Civil Code without collaborators other than assistants that would transcribe his drafts. Among them were Victorino de la Plaza, who later would become president, Eduardo Díaz de Vivar and Vélez Sársfield's daughter Aurelia. For the task, Vélez Sársfield withdrew to a country house he owned, located a few kilometers from Buenos Aires city, where he wrote the drafts that his assistants transcribed. The final transcript was delivered to the government for its printing, and was later destroyed. The drafts can currently be found at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.

As Vélez Sársfield moved forward with his work, he would send it to the executive branch, which would then print and distribute it among the legislators, magistrates, lawyers and "competent persons, to allow them to study the work now and build an opinion of it for the time of its ratification". Vélez Sársfield finished Book I in 1865, the first two sections of Book II in 1866, the third section of that book at the beginning of 1867, Book III in 1868, and Book IV in 1869, finishing the code after 4 years and 2 months of work.

The project completed, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento sent a note to the Congress on August 25, 1869 proposing the law that would ratify the project of the Civil Code. In the message, Sarmiento recommended immediate implementation, "entrusting its reform to the passage of future laws that will be enacted as experience dictates their necessity".

The Chamber of Deputies approved the project on September 22, 1869 after rejecting various alternate version and objections to its being passed without amendment. The chamber determined that it would become effective on January 1, 1871. It then passed to the Senate, which ratified it on September 25, and it was promulgated by Sarmiento on September 29.

The Project was closed-book endorsed, that is it was accepted without changes to the original, which according to Llambías did not require any debate:

Parliamentary bodies, due to their composition and functioning, lack the capacity to undertake the study and analytical debate related to a scientific task of such a delicate systematic nature as a Code. It can only be expected that such debate will become inorganic and endless, and that in the case of the passage of proposed amendments the coherence of the general system will be ruined, through the failure to recognize that the main advantage of codifying efforts resides in the methodizing of the law, which allows the maximum usefulness to be obtained from it later. —Llambías (2003). ps. 171 and ss.

The endorsement of the Civil Code represented a great improvement over the previous legal regime, and fused modern advances in doctrine with local customs and active law.