Page 415 - Latent Defect or Excessive Price?Exploring Early Modern Legal Approach to Remedying Defects in Goods Exchanged for Money - Bruijn

CONTEMPORARY CIVIL LAW
and Schadenersatz for losses which resulted from the non-conformity are also arranged separately. The remedies for rescission (Rücktritt) and price reduction are, as general remedies in the event of a creditor's Pflichtverletzung, brought under the general part of the BGB on relations between debtors and creditors (Schuldverhältnisse).55
As Zimmermann points out, these revisions do not solve all problems from which the BGB 1900 suffered. In particular with regard to how the limitation periods of the remedies for non-performance, delivery of a non-conforming thing, and delict relate to each other remains unclear.56
8.3.1 Limitation
The 2002 reform particularly aimed at simplifying the law of limitation. The general 30-year period of limitation of the BGB 1900, which governed the remedies for eviction and encumbrances on sold objects, was considered too long, while the limitation periods of the remedies for defects in the thing sold of six months or one year were believed to be too short.57
In keeping with the abolition of the dogmatic difference between non-performance and breach of safeguarding duties, the BGB's reform introduced new limitation periods for the various remedies. The 30-year general limitation in § 195 BGB 1900, which applied to all contractual and non-contractual remedies, unless otherwise determined, was replaced by a three-year limitation in § 195 BGB 2002.58 However, going against the rationale of equating a breach of safeguarding duties with non-performance, the remedies for non- conformity are not subjected to this general three year period of limitation in § 195 BGB 2002. Since the reform of the BGB in 2002 the limitation of remedies for defects in the thing sold - by then called remedies for non-conformity with agreed qualities (vereinbarte
55 § 439 BGB 2002.
56 Zimmermann, The new German Law of Obligations, pp. 116-117.
57 Behrensmeyer, Die Verjährung, p. 11; Zimmermann, The New German law of Obligations, pp. 93seq.; §
477 BGB 1900; see 7.7.3.
58 § 195 BGB 2002: Die regelmäßige Verjährungsfrist beträgt drei Jahre; Behrensmeyer, Die Verjährung, p.
22.
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