Mirow on The Mexican Civil Code of 1928 and the Social Function of Property in Mexico and Latin America @FIULaw

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has published The Mexican Civil Code of 1928 and the Social Function of Property in Mexico and Latin America at 37 Emory Int'l L. Rev. 365 (2023). Here is the abstract.

The social function of property and the version of this idea expounded by French jurist Léon Duguit did not find a significant home in the Mexican Civil Code of 1928, and these ideas of property were only subsequently adopted as a guiding principles of Mexican property law. After the promulgation of the Code, private law jurists read the social function of property and Duguit’s work ahistorically into the property provisions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and the Civil Code of 1928. This intellectual work by jurists and commentators during and after the 1930s pulled European trends of the social function of property into the mainstream of Mexican legal thought. Thus, Mexican thinking on property joined this international trend and subsequently gained recognition as part of broader international developments in property theory. This concordance of Mexican property law with international trends was then mistakenly read back to place Mexico as the originator of the social function of property in Latin America. The Mexican incorporation of the social function of property is contrasted with related experiences of Chile in 1925, Colombia in 1936, Cuba in 1940, and Argentina in 1949.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.