Page 225 - Latent Defect or Excessive Price?Exploring Early Modern Legal Approach to Remedying Defects in Goods Exchanged for Money - Bruijn
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CHAPTER FIVE
5.2 Early modern Dutch legal doctrine on the law of latent defects
5.2.1 The aedilician remedies: redundant rules?
Since medieval ius commune, scholars continued to explore the possible legal claims of a buyer of a defective thing by means of the aedilician remedies and the remedies granted by the civil action on the sales contract. A major current among medieval scholars believed that the Corpus iuris civilis reserved the various remedies for different cases. Hence the Accursian distinction between the aedilician remedies for corporeal defects, with an objective price estimation, with short periods of limitation, and buyer-friendly characteristics on the one hand, and civil remedies lay for non-corporeal defects, based on a subjective price assessment, with long limitation periods, and without buyer-friendly traits on the other.41 That said, we observed that early modern Castilian civil law had abolished the medieval ius commune distinction between civil and aedilician remedies for latent defects. Castilian civil law and practice disregarded issues such as which scope, method of price assessment and limitation periods in applying the civil and aedilician remedies.42 Conversely, however, many humanist scholars brought back similar issues again into the limelight. The following sections explore the extent to which Dutch civil law and practice joined in with their Castilian and humanist colleagues.
5.2.1.1 Scope of the civil and aedilician remedies
Arnold Vinnius (1588-1657)43, professor in Leiden, discusses the aedilician remedies in chapter 15 of his Jurisprudentiae contractae sive partitionum iuris civilis libri IV, under the heading 'What the obligations are under the sales contract according to the nature and the scope of this remedy'.44 Drawn toward French legal humanism, Vinnius largely framed his work on Doneau's Commentarius. Hence, it may not come as a surprise that Vinnius adopts almost the same dogmatic positions formulated by Doneau about the scope of the civil and aedilician remedies. Indeed, Vinnius restates Doneau's opinion that the aedilician remedy for returning the thing bought can only be brought, if someone had bought an item with a corporeal defect.45 Non-corporeal defects exclude both the remedy for returning the thing and price reduction with the exception of those defects which are explicitly mentioned in the aedilician edict.46
In a footnote to the main text, Vinnius adds that the abovementioned remedies are
41 See 2.2.
42 See 3.3.1.
43 For biographical data see J. van Kuyk, 'Vinnius, Arnoldus', in: NNBW, vol. 3, pp. 1312-1314.
44 'Quae sint praestationes in emptione et venditione pro natura et potestate eius iudicii'.
45 Doing so while hardly giving credit to his example. Something nearest to that can be found in the
foreword to Vinnius' Jurisprudentiae contractae: 'Proinde cum ex libris iuris civilis adjutus paucorum qui in hoc genere excelluerunt et praesertim Donelli nostri Commentariis, excerpsissem congessissemque praeceptiones omne et theoremata universalia...', Vinnius, Jurisprudentiae contractae, fo. 4.
46 Vinnius, Jurisprudentiae contractae, 2.15, p. 247.'De vitiis animi redhibitoria non datur, praeterquam de iis, quae aedicto aedilitio nominatim comprehensa sunt'; cf. Donellus, In titulum, p. 274: 'Illud notandum est, vitia hoc edicto intelligi corporis, non animi, ut ex illis redhibitoria fit, ex his non item. Argumento est, quod nominatim postea de errone et fugitivo edicitur, quae vitia animi sunt, non corporis'.
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