Page 288 - Latent Defect or Excessive Price?Exploring Early Modern Legal Approach to Remedying Defects in Goods Exchanged for Money - Bruijn

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NATURAL LAW
early modern scholasticism. Yet, the implications of deductive reasoning are made more explicit, even by scholars not so versed in natural law theory. So we find the usus modernus-scholar Gottlieb Gerhard Titius (1661-1714)9 plainly stating that both the aedilician remedies and the remedy for lesion beyond moiety serve to safeguard the natural law requirement of fairness in exchange:
'It is evident from their nature that contracts in which both parties have to perform require equality. Therefore, an ocurring inequality produces a lesion, which has to be corrected according to a precept of natural law...\[§3\] Concerning the lesion that originates in defects in things; to take care of its correction pertained to the Aediles... whence the Aedilician Edict, in which the aediles proposed really nothing else than natural decrees about omitting lesion, compensating damages and keeping good faith... \[§12\] Secondly, the lesion must be considered which originates in inequality of price, see §1 of this title'.10
Inspired by his Castilian predecessors, somewhat earlier, Grotius had already contemplated the law of latent defects and their conformity to the requirement of fairness in exchange. In the event of sales, such a requirement was the yardstick with which the tenability of ius commune-provisions would be measured, since 'natural equity governs in contracts in such a manner that a right is produced from inequality for him who has less'11. An important difference, however, between Grotius and his Castilian forerunners is that Grotius abstracts from the catholic context in which early modern scholastics conceived their theories. Divine law is no longer the ultimate source from which principles and rules flow. Secondly, Grotius translates the distinction between rules that prevailed in the forum internum and those that have to be lived up to in the forum externum into secular terms; a rational, ideal type of natural law should be taken as a model for the civil law (burger- wet).12 In Grotius' view it is man's desire to form a society (appetitus societatis) that evokes
9
E. Landsberg, 'Titius, Gottlieb Gerhard', in: ADB 38 (1894), pp. 379-380.
10 Titius, Iuris privati, 4.20, §1, 3 and 12, pp. 562, 564: 'Contractus onerosos requirere aequalitatem, ex
ipsorum natura manifestum est. Interveniens igitur inaequalitas laesionem parit, quae, ex iuris naturalis praescripto, emendari debet...\[§3\] Quod attinet laesionem, quae ex vitiis rerum oritur, eius emendandae cura, apud Romanos, ad Aediles pertinuit, hinc Edictum Aedilitium... in quo nihil aliud fere quam decreta naturalia de omittenda laesione, damno resarciendo ac fide servanda, Aediles proposuerunt. \[§12\] Postea consideranda est laesio, quae ex inequalitate pretii oritur, v. §1, h.'; similarly, Barbeyrac (1674- 1744) who in his translation of Pufendorf's De iure naturae explains that the aedilician and the civil remedies are both examples of how contractual imbalance is remedied in Roman law. Barbeyrac, Le droit de la nature, 5.3.1, p. 30, fn. 2; also Hahn, Observata, vol. 2, to D. 21.1, no. IX, p. 20: 'vitia rerum venditarum ex justitia commutativa a venditore debent manifestari... Nisi forte invincibiliter ignoretur ab utroque contrahente'; Klempt, Grundlagen, p. 69.
11 Grotius, IBP, 2.12.8: 'In contractibus natura aequalitatem imperat, et ita quidem, ut ex inaequalitate ius oriatur minus habenti'; Also Felden (d. 1688), Annotata, ad. lib. 1.2, §. 8, p. 12 and ad. lib. 2.12, §8, p. 21; Wolff, Ius natura methodo, vol. 4, 671, §976; Darjes (1714-1791), Institutiones § 485, p. 255; Klempt, Grundlagen, p. 32, 46.
12 Grotius, 'De Aequitate', p. 223: 'unde ad ipsa naturae principia recurrendum fuit, ut ita suppleretur ex infinito id quod finito deerat. Perfecta enim norma infinitae rei finita esse non potest; quo illud pertinet, quod et philosophi et iurisconsulti dixere, leges non his quae unquam accidere possunt, sed his quae plerumque accidunt aptari'.
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