A Treatise On The Law Of Obligations Or Contracts

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1806 edition. Excerpt: ... the wine that I shall grow the ensuing year, the obligation is valid, although the wine does not exist. But if my vines are frozen, so that no wine can be got from them, the obligation fails for want of an object, and is as if it had never been contracted. The rule, that things to arise in future may be the object os an obligation, was subject to an exception in the Roman law as to future successions. These laws proscribed as indeceat, and contrary to general propriety, (honnete pub/ique, ) all agreements with respect to future successions, whether a person contracted and disposed of his own future succession in favour of another person to whom he promised to leave it, even when the agreement was made by a contract of marriage, /. 15. cod. de pact (a), or those by which the parties contracted upon the future succession of a third person, .which they or one of them expected to receive, I. fin. cod. dt pact (i). at least unless such third person intervened and gave his consent to the agreement, d. I. ad.fi. In the law of France, the favour of marriage contracts admits of agreements respecting future successions. A person by his marriage contract may engage to leave his wife his future succession in the whole or in part, or to leave it to the children of the marriage. They may also by marriage contracts, make such agreements for the interest; of the two contracting families concerning future successions, from a third person as they think proper. With the exception of contracts of marriage, agreements COncemfa) Pact J m quod dotali instrument!) comprehensum est, ut, fi fattt vita suvgerttur, ex oXfma porttone fa, qua r, ubebatt cum fratre hem p.ir s f*i J/'t: neque ullam obl'gationem coatrahere, neque libertatem teltamenti faciendi...

Translated by Francois-Xavier Martin. Originally published: NewBern, N.C.: Martin & Ogden, 1802. 2 vols. in 1 book. xii (iii-xii new introduction), xii], 364; ix], 315, 1] pp. With a new introduction by Warren M. Billings, Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, University of New Orleans and Bicentennial Historian of the Supreme Court of Louisiana. Reprint of the rare New Bern edition. In the decades before the Civil War this classic treatise was required reading for practitioners, scholars and law students. Martin, an attorney and printer in New Bern, North Carolina, later a distinguished lawyer in Louisiana, gained distinction for this translation. This treatise was an important influence on British and American contract law. Marvin quotes and endorses an assessment by Luther Cushing that includes the following remark by one of Pothier's earlier editors, Andr Dupin: " Pothier on Obligations] is not only a good book of law, but an excellent book on morals; a work of all countries, of all nations; a book, to which antiquity can present to rival but the Offices of Cicero." John Gage Marvin, Legal Bibliography (1847) 578. "The Treatise on Obligations was soon recognized as a major contribution to legal science."--David M. Walker, Oxford Companion to Law 973. ROBERT JOSEPH POTHIER 1699-1772] was arguably the greatest French jurist of the eighteenth century. A brilliant scholar, he is renowned for his treatises on Roman law and the various branches of French civil law, which were primary sources for the French Civil Code. FRANCOIS-XAVIER MARTIN 1762-1846], a Frenchborn lawyer, judge, author, translator, printer and historian, is an important figure in the legal history of the south. His career began in North Carolina. He later moved to the Louisiana territory, where he played the central role in the reorganization of its legal system. Appointed attorney-general when Louisiana became a state, he is considered the father of Louisiana jurisprudence.