Contract of contracting

Pact of contrahendo, mainly mentioned under the latinismo or Latin locution pactum of contrahendo, is a legal term originated in the field of the Roman Law, that refers to a precontract or preliminary agreement in which two or more parties commit to negotiate a future contract or formal agreement on a specific subject. This previous agreement therefore becomes a subsequent obligation to contract and in damages or penalties in the event of failure to comply with this obligation. Thus, this precontract would have been permitted, but originally subject to the same procedural requirements that should govern the final contract to which it should give rise. However, there are authors who, despite recognizing the Roman origin of the expression and the existence of precontractual figures and the respective casuistic examples in that civilization, deny that the Roman Law has reached the level of abstraction necessary to elaborate a sort of theory about it.

This in general, because the precise scope of the expression pactum of contrahendo can be varied and qualified according to the criteria of various authors, sources, jurisdictions and matters of law in which it is applied, differing in some aspects from other precontractual forms , as the similar negotiating pactum. International right For example, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of International Law, published by the University of Oxford, points out in the respective entry that the "exact meaning (of pactum de contrahendo ) is uncertain, "adding that" fortunately (the locution) is rarely used. "

Despite this assertion, there have been a number of cases in which the concept has been at the heart of international disputes and cases. For example, in May 2015, the concept was particularly important in the allegations of jurisdiction at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, following the lawsuit filed by that court in Bolivia requesting that Chile be obliged to negotiate "access sovereign to the sea ". On that occasion, the Plurinational State of Bolivia focused an important part of its exposition in arguing the alleged existence of a pactum of contrahendo in that sense between both states.

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