Legal Regime of the Right of Superficies in Romania

In Romanian law, the right of superficies has not known a legal regulation before passing the Law no 287/2009 on Civil Code, this one being acknowledged only by way of doctrine and jurisprudence. The right of superficies consists in the right of ownership which a person has over the construction from the land belonging to another one. As one will notice from our study, in case of the right of superficies, two categories of rights overlap, as we the Romanian courts of law have also acknowledged, namely: on the one hand, the constructor’s right of ownership over the construction and his right of use over the land on which the construction is placed; on the other hand, the right of the owner of the land on which the construction is placed to claim from the constructor to use the land on which the construction is found, according to the destination to which it is forced to pay also, if so agreed, a proper compensation for the use of that land. Therefore, the right of superficies is a beneficial right of the right of ownership of the land owner on which the construction is built by detaching from the legal content thereof of the attributes of possession and use, which are afterwards awarded to the constructor.