Law Blog

Article 495A of the Civil Code (Cap. 16) introduced a judicial mechanism intended to resolve stalemates in co-ownership. Traditionally, Maltese law relied primarily on the action for partition where co-owners could not agree on the fate of the property. Article 495A created an additional remedy by allowing the majority of co-owners to request the court […]

Historic stone buildings often give the impression of permanence. Their thick masonry walls, monumental proportions, and enduring presence in the landscape suggest a material capable of resisting time almost indefinitely. Yet the reality is more nuanced. Stone structures age slowly through a series of subtle physical and chemical processes that, while often invisible at first, […]

Regularisation applications often raise a deceptively simple question: who must show that a development does not harm its surroundings? At first glance, one might think that the Planning Authority must establish the existence of such harm before refusing regularisation. After all, the regulation itself appears to place the emphasis on the Authority’s judgment. Regulation 4(5) […]

When property is subject to temporary emphyteusis, the economic value of the property must be divided between two legal interests: the dominium utile, which entitles the emphyteuta to enjoy the property during the remaining duration of the emphyteusis, and the dominium directum, which entitles the ground-rent owner to receive the annual ground rent and to […]

At first sight, those who argue that Annex 2 of DC15 is legally problematic cannot simply be dismissed as irrational. Their reasoning is easy to understand. If a Local Plan states that development is limited to a specific number of floors — for example four floors— it seems natural to assume that the planning framework […]

Malta’s constitutional neutrality has long been treated as a settled domestic compromise. Yet, as the European Union recalibrates its external posture in response to shifting geopolitical pressures, that compromise is no longer insulated from supranational dynamics. The interaction between unanimity in the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the possible reconfiguration of political alignments within the […]