THE CONTRACT AND CONVENTION
THE CONTRACT AND CONVENTION

Summary/Abstract: The contract is the most important type of legal act, the latter being the closest type of all types of legal manifestations with the aim of creating legal effects.The new Civil Code expressly regulates the unilateral legal act and the contract as species of the legal act. Apart from these, the new Civil Code also refers to other types of legal acts creating legal effects, conventions and plurilateral contracts, without however regulating their own legal regime, but organizing some of the types of legal operations that it defines as conventions. Leaving aside the latter, which the legislator of the mentioned normative act only mentions in one context, that of nullities, the notion of convention is used in several times either when he wants to reveal any kind of agreement of wills generating legal effects (art. 557 paragraph 1 Civil Code), or when organizing certain types of legal operations, such as the transfer or modification of some of the legal relationships. It is thus understood that the new Civil Code preserves the distinction inherited from Roman law between convention and contract, in which the former was the proximate type of legal agreements born through agreements of will, having as its object any other legal operation apart from the birth of obligations, effect what would be proper to the contract, the latter being the most important type of convention.Such a conclusion is however contradicted by the definition given by the new Civil Code of the contract which includes the operations of birth, modification and extinguishment of legal relations. However, this definition does not make any reference to the transfer of real rights, nor to the birth of legal entities.

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