Collatio Bonorum

Under certain circumstances, an heir could be compelled to restore assets he had previously acquired from the deceased to the estate. This ‘bringing in of assets' (collatio bonorum) was introduced by the praetor as a result of the edictum unde liberi, in terms of which the emancipated child (emancipatus) could apply for bonorum possessio and thus inherit with the sui heredes on intestacy from the paterfamilias?³ It was thought that it would be unfair towards the sui heredes to divide the inheritance equally among them, since as a rule the emancipatus upon discharge from his father's potestas received some form of patrimony from his father and could acquire property after his emancipation.

On the other hand, everything the sui heredes had acquired during the father's lifetime accrued to and increased the property of the father. In order to address this inequitable situation, the praetor decreed that if the emancipatus wished to inherit on an equal footing with the sui heredes he should first bring the value of his own estate into the inheritance (conferre, whence collatio bonorum). This did not mean that the emancipatus literally had to restore all that he acquired, but it was taken into consideration when his share was calculated.^{^[1133]}^{^[1134] ^[1135] ^[1136]}

The same principle was later extended to the case where a father provided his daughter with a dowry (dos), which then became the property of her husband as previously noted in this text. If the daughter wished to inherit on the same basis as the sui heredes, she had to ‘bring in' the value of the dowry (collatio dotis)?⁵

5.5.6

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Source: Mousourakis G.. Fundamentals of Roman Private Law. Springer, 2012.— 366 p.. 2012

Collatio Bonorum

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