The legal personality of foreign states in civil law: l’affaire Zappa and the bequest of the Marquise du Plessis-Bellière

Abstract

This article traces the doctrinal debate on the civil legal personality of foreign states occasioned by two famous legal cases during the closing decade of the nineteenth century: the protracted conflict between Greece and Romania following Evangelis Zappa’s bequest of immovable property located in Romania to the Greek state for the purpose of resurrecting the Olympic Games, and the contested will of the Marquise du Plessis-Bellière which named Pope Leo xiii as legatee of real estate located in France. As Ernst Rabel and others have thought, the debate confirmed the scholarly consensus that the recognition given to a foreign state according to the rules of public international law, implies recognition of its capacity in private law matters. The objective of this article is to reconstruct the considerations that led to this apparent consensus, thus helping to facilitate an assessment of the persuasiveness of those considerations.