Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

The admissibility of retroactivity and the extent of its effects in contract law

Publication at Faculty of Law |
2020

Abstract

The adoption of new legal regulation always entails the need to address the relatively complex issue of the effect of new norms over time (intertemporality). The more complex the questions, the more complex the adopted regulation or the more legal conditions are to be affected.

Recently, we have encountered this mainly during the recodification of private law. However, the subject of our consideration is not the analysis of all transitional provisions of the Civil Code of 2012, but only the consideration of selected aspects of retroactivity in the law of obligations (hereinafter also contractual retroactivity).

An issue on which there is no unity in doctrine yet and which has not yet been subject to judicial review. Our consideration will focus on two partial questions, the first of which already has its solution accepted by the doctrine of the majority and reflected by the case law.

However, without a brief introduction (rather a summary), it would be difficult to approach the second question that follows it. This concerns, on the one hand, the admissibility of contractual retroactivity as a consequence of the autonomy of the will of the parties and, on the other hand, the closely related question of the extent of such retroactive effects (ie the temporal scope of retroactive effect).

Simply put, how far can the we go, with the agreed retroactive effect, without at the same time oversizing the admissibility of contractual retroactivity?