Contract and Illicit Act

This volume draws its origins from the civil law course, mainly focused on the discipline of the general part of the contract and on liability for unlawful acts. The central nucleus is preceded by an ancillary section dedicated to the obligation in general and to credit guarantees.

In the general part of the contract, particular attention has been paid to the effects of non-fulfilment in contracts of duration, a topic that is rarely - and not only in the manuals - treated in a systematic way, perhaps because of the very architecture of the civil code, which, in regulating the contract in general, takes as a reference the contract of instantaneous execution, dedicating very little space to contracts of duration. These, however, have now assumed, in the current economic system, a diffusion and a not negligible relevance, a circumstance that can no longer justify a persistent indifference on the part of the interpreter.

In addressing liability for unlawful acts, special attention has been paid to personal injury and to the various issues - starting with the complicated events involving art. 2059 of the civil code - that have engaged jurisprudence and doctrine in recent years.

Finally, the choice to deal with the contract and civil liability concurrently - which represent the main sources of the obligation in the civil code and which are usually addressed in separate contexts - is due to the fact that, to an increasing extent, forms of mixing between the two figures have emerged and liability cases have been proposed that are located on an ideal border line. These observations have led to the belief that a parallel treatment of the two institutions is useful, enriched, where possible, by a direct comparison between similar cases (think, for example, of the state of danger referred to in art. 1447 of the civil code, and the state of necessity contemplated by art. 2045 of the civil code).