Development of the law regarding inaedificatio : a constitutional analysis

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Inaedificatio entails that movables that have been permanently attached to land through building cease to exist as independent things and become part of the land. Courts have adopted different approaches over time to investigate whether or not inaedificatio had occurred. It is sometimes said that courts have moved away from the so-called traditional approach, which focused on the objective factors, to the so-called new approach, which places more emphasis on the subjective intention of the owner of the movables.This thesis analyses the applicable case law and concludes that there is inadequate proof of such a shift since both older cases associated with the traditional approach and later cases associated with the new approach emphasise the intention of the owner of the movables to establish whether accession had taken place. However, the case law does allow for a cautious different conclusion, namely that a certain line of both older and new cases emphasise the owner of the movable's intention for commercial policy reasons, specifically to protect ownership of the movables in cases where ownership had been reserved in a credit sale contract.Constitutional analysis of these conclusions in view of the FNB methodology indicates that the courts' decision to hold that accession had in fact occurred in cases that do involve permanent attachment of movables to land will generally establish deprivation of property for purposes of section 25(1) of the Constitution, but such deprivation would generally not be arbitrary since there would be sufficient reason for it. However, in cases where the courts decide that there was no accession because ownership of the movables had been reserved subject to a credit sale agreement, there is no deprivation of property because the landowner, who is the only one who might complain about the decision, could not prove a property interest for purposes of section 25(1). Moreover, the courts' decision that accession had either occurred or not does not amount to expropriation under section 25(2) of the Constitution because there is no common law authority for expropriation.Therefore, the principal conclusion of the thesis is that the courts' decision that accession had either occurred or not would generally be in line with the property clause of the Constitution.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University