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All contracts involve agreement.

On close inspection that simple­looking statement can be made to suffer from historical, semantic and analytical difficulties. But it manages to survive them, at least in a rough and ready way.

Contracts consensu differ from the rest only in requiring nothing else. They do not require the agreement to be expressed in any particular way or acted upon up to a certain point. They become binding in law when the agreement is complete. In other words the conclusion of the agreement is one and the same with the conclusion of the legal contract. The label was attached in the classical law. We have already discussed the extent to which Justinian imposed a require­ment of writing and made their enforceability depend on the giving of arra. On views more extreme than the one taken here, �consensual’ had become a misnomer for the law of his time.

There are four contracts in this category: emptio-venditio (sale), locatio- conductio (hire), societas (partnership) and mandatum (commission, or agency). As well as being consensual, these contracts also share another important characteristic. They were all enforced by, and thus all developed within, actions which referred the �ought’ not to strictum ius but to bona fides. The question sent to the judge was, What ought the defendant to give or do ex fide bona (in, or on the basis of, good faith)? This characteristic of the actions worked back into the contracts themselves, decisively influencing the shape of each package of implied obligations.

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Source: Birks Peter. Roman Law of Obligations. Oxford University Press,2014. — 303 p.. 2014

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