Periculum rei venditae e periculum dotis aestimatae

Abstract

The great majority of the romanistic literature ascribes to classical Roman Law the periculum est emptoris doctrine, according to which the risk or periculum (i.e., the chance or possibility that the object of the sale might accidentally perish) had to be immediately born by the purchaser once the sale was perfect (and, accordingly, even before the goods had been actually conveyed to him). Opposing the communis opinio, the author of the present essay tries to demonstrate, by the analysis of several passages of the Roman sources concerning the dos aestimata, that, on the contrary, in classical law the so-called "german solution" (also adopted in the brazilian Civil Code) — according to which the purchaser only had to bear the risk after the traditio or delivery of the merx — had a fundamental significance in not few texts of the Roman jurisprudence.