‘DE FACTO’ CIVIL SEPARATION AND CANONICAL SEPARATION: INHERITANCE RIGHTS OF THE WIDOWED SPOUSE

Abstract

It seems reasonable to affirm that rights to inheritance should vary between existing marriages and cases of legal separation or even divorce. Nonetheless, the question analysed in this article is whether the same regulation shall apply to those situations in which either de facto separation or canonical separation - both legal regimes coexist in Spain - have been chosen instead of legal separation. Special attention is paid to those two scenarios of particularly difficult interpretation, consid