Sunday, September 6, 2015

Reinventing reivindicatoria


I first met "reivindicatoria" or more specifically "accion reivindicatoria" in Paras' Civil Code of the Philippines Annotated, Vol. II, 2008 Edition on page 124:


The UP 2012 Remedial Law Reviewer uses the same word and phrase on one page  :

But on the same page a different word twice appeared:


Did UP invent the word? It seems not because the UST 2011 Golden Notes for Civil Procedure uses reinvindicatoria and only that word in conjunction with "accion":


The Bedan Red Book 2015 for Remedial Law  follows suit on page 652:


So I "appealed" to SC jurisprudence and this is when things took an interesting turn.

A Google search shows that the SC uses reinvindicatoria  in 39 decisions, predating those reviewers, which can be seen here. But another Google search lists 53 decisions using reivindicatoria. Click here for a listing.

And five decisions  use both words as listed here.

Which is which then?

Paras got it right. Here's an article from Wikipedia explaining the phrase. Well, OK, that's Spanish. But our Civil Code came from the Codigo Civil, right?


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