Obligations in Roman Law: Past, Present, and Future

Chapter 2. The Roman Conception of Contract

40 Chapter 2 The Roman Conception of Contract* Roberto Fiori For a number of years, the scholarship on Roman law has been heading toward a profound rethinking of the Roman conception of contract. It is well known that between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Alfred Pernice and Silvio Perozzi1 resisted the Pandectist approach—­ drawn from the theory of Natural Law, in which contracts are seen as a manifestation of the will of the parties—­arriving at a total rejection of the relevance of consensus and focusing exclusively on the idea of obligation. This rather radical new conceptualization was, in turn, contested by Salvatore Riccobono, who vigorously reaffirmed the centrality of agreement.2 During the same period, writers such as Pietro Bonfante, Emilio Betti, and Pietro de Francisci3 put forth what we can describe as an intermediate definition: it did not totally reject the importance of agreement but placed greater emphasis on * The principal Latin passages cited in the text are translated at the end of this article. The translations are based on Watson, The “Digest” of Justinian (1998) and Gordon and Robinson, The “Institutes” of Gaius (1988), with modifications. 1. Pernice, “Vertragslehre” (1888) 195ff.; Perozzi, “Contratto consensuale” (1898) 565ff.; Perozzi, Le obbligazioni romane. (1903) 311ff.; Perozzi,” Dalle obbligazioni da delitto alle obbligazioni da contratto” (1915–­ 16) 443ff. 2. Riccobono,”Dal diritto romano classico al diritto moderno” (1917) 113ff.; “La formazione della teoria generale del contractus” (1929) 123ff.; Corso di diritto romano (1935) 262ff.; “Der Wille als Entwicklungsfaktor” (1949) 55ff. Riccobono was followed, above all, by Voci (La dottrina romana del contratto (1946) 7, 297ff.; “La dottrina del contratto” (1946) 383ff.). 3. Bonfante, “Genesi” (1907) 107ff.; Bonfante, “Il contratto e i patti” (1920) 135ff.; Bonfante, Corso di diritto romano (1979) 249ff.; Bonfante, Istituzioni di diritto romano (1987) 327; Betti, “Valore dogmatico” (1915) 3ff.; Betti, Istituzioni di diritto romano (1962) 2.1:66ff.; de Francisci, Συνάλλαγμα (1916) 2:321ff. The Roman Conception of Contract 41 obligation than on will, on the contrahere (obligationem) than on the “contract.” This became the dominant position in the scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century.4 Beginning in the 1960s, a position that I will call (for the sake of convenience ) “consensualist” has reasserted itself. This development is not a simple return to the theory of Rechtsgeschäft. It is arrived at through modern methodologies that pay attention to historical context and to the contributions of individual jurists,5 and it involves, therefore, a more developed and nuanced approach: it is not a simple projection of modern ideas onto the past but, rather, the uncovering of a series of specific themes and issues in the work of the prudentes , which come to be elaborated on by later jurists, until the creation of the positivistic “theory of the will.”6 This view, consequently, cannot be countered simply by accusing it of being anachronistic: it has to be subjected to a thorough examination in an attempt to understand if the foundations for this direction in the modern scholarship—­in particular, the concept of contract as an agreement that generates obligations—­ can be traced back to the Roman sources.7 4. Albertario, “Le fonti delle obbligazioni” (1923) 77ff.; Lenel, “Interpolationenjagd” (1925) 25; Wieacker, Societas 1 (1936) 80ff. (still closely tied to Perozzi; see also Wieacker, review of Wunner , Contractus [1967] 129ff.); Lauria, “Contractus, delictum, obligatio” (1938) 620ff.; Grosso, Il sistema romano dei contratti (1945) 42ff.; Talamanca, Istituzioni di diritto romano (1990) 534ff.; Talamanca, “Conventio e stipulatio” (1991) 210ff.; Sargenti, “Svolgimento dell’idea di contratto” (1988) 53, 72ff.; Martini, “Il mito del consenso” (1991) 97ff.; Melillo, Contrahere, pacisci, transigere (1994) 125ff., esp. 218–­ 19. 5. Gallo, “Eredità di giuristi romani” (1991) 3ff. Gallo, Synallagma e conventio (1992;1995) views Ulpian’s role as central. Others nominate Pedius for this: see La Pira, “Personalità scientifica” (1938) 293ff.; Schiavone, Studi sulle logiche (1971) esp. 131–­ 32 with n. 178; Schiavone, Giuristi e nobili (1987) 240 n. 76 (suggesting at 61–­ 62, however, that there is already in Q. Mucius “un primo nucleo di pensiero ontologico” (an early nucleus of ontological thought) that allows for the passage from the verb contrahere to the unitary “institution” expressed by the noun contractus); Schiavone, “La scrittura di Ulpiano” (1991) 125ff. For Labeo as the turning point, see Santoro, “Il contratto nel pensiero di Labeone.” (1983). See also Cannata, “La ‘distinctio’ re-­verbis-­litteris-­consensu” (1970) 448–­49 with n. 81; Cannata, “Der Vertrag als zivilrechtlicher Obligierungsgrund” (1995) 59ff...