Dreptul la acţiune şi răspunderea contractuală
Right to action and contractual liability

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores the thesis that the system of contractual liability in the broad sense comprises all prerogatives of legal constraint associated with the personal right flowing from the contract and activated by the unjustified failure to perform the contractual obligation, as well as the consequences of this thesis as concerns the limitation of rights. For historic, functional (economic) and technical legal reasons, contractual liability can be understood as comprising all prerogatives of legal constraint – material rights of action – from the structure of the personal right flowing from the contract, aimed at the protection of the promisee’s positive interest and activated by the unjustified failure to perform the contractual obligation. The overlapping of such prerogatives with the material rights to action, their concentration within the constraint element of the contractual personal right, as well as their relative autonomy allow for a number of solutions concerning the limitation of rights: (i) there is no single limitation associated to all forms of liability (to all remedies for the unjustified failure to perform), but a separate limitation for each form of constraint; (ii) save for cases where special rules apply, the limitation period associated with the contractual personal right itself, in light of its nature or source, is applicable to all forms of contractual liability; (iii) the starting points of the limitation period are distinct for the different remedies arising out of the unjustified failure to perform the contractual obligation; (iv) the sphere of the effects produced by an interruption of the limitation period – i.e., interruption either for a specific form of liability or for all remedies arising out of the unjustified failure to perform – is different depending on the applicable cause of interruption; (v) the circumstances which cause a stay of the limitation period are imposed by the promisee’s particular situation, such that the effect of a stay concerns all forms of liability rather than a particular remedy.

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