Common error in nomine

Occasionally it occurs that the error in nomine is common to both parties. Take the famous case of RGZ 99, 147 sqq. revolving around the only Norwegian word every German law student is likely to know.

In modern German law it is more difficult to reach the same conclusion (the only sensible one); since emphasis is on the parties' declarations, the contract appears to relate to shark meat. The deviation from the declaration-oriented approach is normally justified by reference to the ostensibly time-honoured and venerable common-law maxim of falsa demonstratio non nocet.^[3084] It does indeed go back, via the ius commune, to classical Roman law, but there it served a different, and much more limited, function than is attributed to it today.^[3085] For one thing, it related only to testamentary dispositions; and for another it dealt specifically with a situation in which a person or an object had already been sufficiently identified within the will, but where the testator had added an additional (wrong, but superfluous) designation. "Demonstratio falsa est", as Gaius exemplifies,^[3086]

"veluti si ita scriptum sit: 'servum Stichum, quern de Titio emi', 'fundum Tusculanum, qui mihi a Seio donatus est.' nam si constat, de quo homine, de quo fundo senserit testator, ad rem non pertinet, si is, quern emisse significavit, donatus esset, aut quern donatum sibi esse significaverat, emerit."

7.