Introduction
Every contractual promise engenders expectations in the person of the promisee. These expectations can be disappointed in various ways: the promisor may fail entirely to perform, he may offer performance belatedly or at the wrong place, or his performance may turn out to be unsatisfactory.
In all these cases the promisor has not complied with the duties imposed upon him by the contract. In the terminology of the English common law, a breach of contract has occurred. The French code civil refers to non-performance ("inexecution")* The German BGB, however, does not appear to know such a unitary concept. It deals with only two specific forms of breach of contract (or: reasons for non-performance)—supervening impossibility and delay of performance— and provides separate sets of rules for both of them.2 These rules are of a general nature in so far as they apply to all contracts. The same is true of the doctrine of "positive malperformance", which is not embodied in the code, but had to be developed, extra legem, by courts and legal writers.3 Special rules dealing with liability for defective performance are set out in some of the titles of the BGB dealing with specific contracts.4 This fragmented and unnecessarily intricate way of dealing with the problem of breach of contract has been severely criticized and is «widely regarded today as one of the more unfortunate features of the German Code.5 It is based on pandectist doctrine, and, through it, ultimately on the sources contained in the Corpus Juris Civilis. This leads us back to the approach adopted by the Roman lawyers which, in turn, depended on the type of action applicable in an individual case.2.
More on the topic Introduction:
- Domingo Rafael. Roman Law: An Introduction. Routledge,2018. — 252 p., 2018
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Introduction: Themes and Literature
- Nicholas Barry, Metzger Ernest. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press,1976. — 317 p., 1976
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- INTRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction