Relative nullity can only be requested by the party whom the law intends to protect. It may be covered by confirmation. If the action for relative nullity has several holders, the renunciation of one does not prevent the others from acting.
Confirmation is the act by which the person who could rely on nullity waives it. This act mentions the subject-matter of the obligation and the defect affecting the contract. Confirmation can only take place after the contract has been concluded. Voluntary performance of the contract, with knowledge of the cause of nullity, is equivalent to confirmation. In the case of violence, confirmation can only occur after the violence has ceased….
A party may request in writing that the party who could rely on the nullity either confirm the contract or bring an action for nullity within a period of six months on pain of foreclosure. The cause of the nullity must have ceased. The writing expressly states that if no action for nullity is brought before the expiry of the six-month period, the contract will be deemed to be confirmed.
Where the cause of nullity affects only one or more clauses of the contract, it entails nullity of the entire act only if that clause or those clauses constituted a determining element of the commitment of the parties or of one of them. The contract is maintained when the law repudiates the unwritten clause, or when the purposes of the disregarded rule require its maintenance.
A plea of nullity is not time-barred if it relates to a contract that has not been performed.
A contract validly formed lapses if one of its essential elements disappears. Where the performance of several contracts is necessary for the performance of the same transaction and one of them disappears, contracts whose performance is rendered impossible by that disappearance and those for which the performance of the disappeared contract was a determining condition of a party’s consent lapse. Lapse occurs, however, only if the contracting party against whom…
Lapse terminates the contract. It may give rise to restitution under the conditions set out in articles 1352 to 1352-9.
The contract is interpreted according to the common intention of the parties rather than by stopping at the literal meaning of its terms. Where this intention cannot be detected, the contract is interpreted according to the meaning that a reasonable person placed in the same situation would give to it.
All the clauses of a contract are to be interpreted in relation to each other, giving to each the meaning which respects the coherence of the whole act. When, with the common intention of the parties, several contracts contribute to the same transaction, they are interpreted in relation to it.
When in doubt, a contract by mutual agreement is construed against the creditor and in favour of the debtor, and a contract of adhesion against the person who proposed it.
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is a Registered Trademark of
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182, rue de Rivoli
75001, Paris France
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is a Registered Trademark of
PETROFF LAW FIRM (SELARL LEGASTRAT)
182, rue de Rivoli
75001, Paris France
RCS Paris n°814433470
Paris Bar Registration n° (Toque) C2396
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