Page 271 - Latent Defect or Excessive Price?Exploring Early Modern Legal Approach to Remedying Defects in Goods Exchanged for Money - Bruijn

CHAPTER FIVE
moiety (laesio enormis) as such.275
Of the scholars who follow Grotius there are Van Leeuwen and Voet. Though Van
Leeuwen mentions a deceived and deceiving (bedrogen) party, it can be doubted whether he has fraud in the sense of dolus in mind. Dutch legal terminology uses the verb bedriegen in the sense of 'being deceived' or 'outwitting another'. Since Van Leeuwen merely repeats what Grotius had already stated, he seems to share Grotius' dogmatic underpinning of the remedy.276 Voet, however, does not. He sticks to the ius commune- doctrine of dolus in re ipsa.277
Roman-Frisian jurists who wrote about the remedy are equally ambivalent in explaining it in terms of fraud or error. Ulrik Huber terms the remedy one which corrects an all too great inequality between price and thing traded, even if that disproportionality is not the result of fraud or error.278 This leaves the reader wondering how Huber fits in the remedy in civil law dogmatics. In his Positiones, however, Huber seems to adopt the view that lesion beyond moiety equals fraud.279
Ulrik Huber's son Zacharias more plainly refers to the doctrine of dolus in re ipsa.280 In a reference to Van den Sande, Zacharias Huber seems to qualify dolus in re ipsa as 'without fraud' (absque dolus). Yet, this seems an imprecise rendering of Van den Sande's writing. Admittedly, Van den Sande explains that buyer and seller are allowed to outwit each other within the borders drawn by the remedy for lesion beyond moiety. Nevertheless, he never explicitly says that the latter remedy can be instituted regardless of the other party's fraud.281 Hence, it is difficult to determine which of the doctrines of dolus in re ipsa, presumption of fraud, or error Van den Sande had ruled out.
Van den Sande's wavering attitude is exemplary of the legal climate in Dutch legal doctrine and practice in which multiple views competed. It may be that it concerned a point of minor importance of which scholars did not see the need to come to a consistent interpretation. After all, the consequences of lesion beyond moiety were the same
275 Schorer's note to Grotius' Inleidinge, 3.52.1, p. 773: 'Propter laesionem tamen enormissima quae dolo aequiparatur transactionenem rescindere... '.
276 Van Leeuwen, Het Rooms-Hollands regt, 4.20.5, p. 387: 'Niet dat daar door juyst de gehele handeling word vernietigt, maar dat die geen die den andere bedrogen, of misleid had, sou mogen volstaan indien hy wilde, mids wer-gevende so veel he verkoste goed minder waard was als hy had genote, of den Koper inbreng ende het geen het gekoste goed meerder waard was als hy had gegeven...'; Brom, Urteilsbegründungen, p. 245, n. 667; on the terminology used by Van Leeuwen see Hallebeek, 'Some remarks', p. 22.
277 Voet, Commentarius, vol. 3, to D. 18.5, no. 3, p. 456
278 Huber, Praelectiones, to D. 18.5, no. 7, p. 987: 'Ratio fundamentalis huius remedii est enormis
inaequalitas inter mercem et pretium... sine respectu doli aut erroris, huius aut illius. Sed lex eiusmodi
venditiones, in quibus est inaequalitas ultra duplum, ut intolerabiles improbat'.
279 Huber, Positiones, to D. 18.5, no. 3, p. 207: 'is qui hanc inaequalitatem urget in dolo esse videatur, per l.
36, d. V.O. \[D. 45.1.36\]'.
280 Zacharias Huber, Observationes, vol. 1, obs. 7, p. 29: 'Tunc enim, quia res ipsa in se dolum habet,
propria Constitutione rescinditur emptio, l. 2, C. de resc. vend. \[C. 4.44.2\]'.
281 Zacharias Huber, Observationes, vol. 1, obs. 46, p. 171: 'sive cum Sandio aliisque dicas omnes b.f.
contractus esse reformandos ob modicam laesionem, etsi dolus absit'; Van den Sande, Decisiones, 3.4, def. 17, p. 212 \[right column\].
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