Legal Assets and Subjective Legal Situations on the Threshold of Patrimoniality: Challenges in Times of Conceptual Discredit

Abstract

This study analyzes aspects of the doctrinal treatment of the concept of legal assets and its discontinuities in our tradition. It highlights how the attachment to the possibility of private appropriation and commercialization previously justified the association of assets with patrimonial interests (understood as having economic value). It describes how the methodological and evaluative shift brought about by the application of the principle of human dignity to civil law added a second, residually defined meaning to the adjective "patrimonial", so as to indicate the kind of legal interests not considered to be derived directly from the general clause on the protection of the human person. In this second meaning, it is proposed that every legal interest is necessarily patrimonial, thus avoiding reducing existential interests to this category, in order to demarcate their priority protection and to demonstrate that their mechanisms of recognition and legal protection are profoundly distinct from the classical means of attributing and enforcing subjective legal situations affecting assets. The article argues for preventing existential interests from being reduced to the status of "assets," a risk that is particularly present in the fallacious category of "digital assets”, whose conception proves inadequate both from a logical standpoint, considering our conceptual tradition, and from a valuational one, in light of the constitutional values’ framework. Finally, the article criticizes the discipline proposed for "digital assets" within the scope of the so-called "digital law" by Bill No. 4/2025 (reform of the Civil Code).