This is the second book of the Spanish Civil Law collection on Succession Law. The first one titled “Casebook on Spanish Succession Law” was addressed to students. It gave them fact patterns based on real cases and asked them to investigate and decide the controversies presented. In this second book, we now study the judgments themselves, including an analysis of the holdings, and an explanation of their significance in the context of recent developments in Spanish Succession Law. In this book, we invite you to travel through Spanish Succession Law. This voyage follows the way the subject is taught in the regular syllabus of Spanish law schools. May this book help bring the reader to an almost-magical realization about how this branch of law, the daughter of a tradition of two thousand years old, whose rules operate with almost mathematical precision, could still, to this day, be so vibrant, alive, and unceasingly evolving, through new judicial approaches to its interpretation and application.

One of the most effective teaching tools for the study of law is the case method because it encourages students to step into the shoes of a judge, policymaker, a party and the public in order to address complex real life problems. Consistent with this, this Casebook on Spanish Successions Law offers 38 relevant rulings of the Spanish Courts with doctrinal commentaries, so that the students can do their own independent research, analysis, and conclusions. As Benjamin Franklin says, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

The aim of this work is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to pay tribute to the work of the General Drafting Commission that was able to outline a valuable and avant-garde proposal for modernising the Spanish Civil Code. On the other hand, it seeks to provide a legal resource in English to enable scholars from other legal systems to study this legislative proposal and understand the development of civil law in Spain. To this end, the translated text of the proposal is included as part of this work. Moreover, this study is rounded out with the analysis of a piece of legislation that has undoubtedly provided Spanish civil law with the greatest boost it has experienced in recent times. This is Law 8/2021 of 2 June that reformed civil and procedural legislation to support people with disabilities in the exercise of their legal capacity. This text is included to provide a more comprehensive overview of the evolution of Spanish civil law. Finally, these work is aimed to provide a useful legal resource to make Spanish law visible in the global academic community