The Concept of Co-Use

Abstract

The concept of co-use is currently unknown to modern Russian legislation. The article is concerned with this phenomenon, which has been insufficiently investigated in the domestic jurisprudence. The author presents the general characteristics of the legal nature of co-use, which may arise from various grounds, in particular, based on a lease agreement of a part of a thing. The paper considers the development of the concept of “part of a thing” in the Russian legal order, the attitude of the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation to the admissibility of renting a part of a thing and the application of provisions on a lease agreement to such a legal relationship by analogy, the discussion on the object of the lease agreement, the object of ownership and their fundamental difference. The article also examines the issues of registration of a part of a thing in the unified state register of real estate and the need for its separate by cadastral registration and other possible ways of individualization of the object of the lease agreement by its parties. The issues of protection of the tenant’s rights are touched upon, specifically, his status as a user of the thing and the relationship with other tenants of other parts of the same thing. The logic of the impossibility of attributing such a person to the possessors of the thing is presented. The concepts of “plurality of persons on the tenant’s side” and “couse” are distinguished. Attention is drawn to the logic of the possibility of renting a part of a thing due to the fact that the economic interest of a participant in civil turnover may consist precisely in using a certain part, and not the whole thing.