Transactionis causa : studi sulla transazione civile dal tardo diritto comune ai codici. Parte prima. La dottrina dei secoli XV e XVI

Among the instruments granted to individuals to solve legal disputes the transaction holds a place of particular importance. The transaction has always been at the centre of a heated hermeneutic debate and it ended by soliciting differing opinions in doctrine, harbingers of conflicting views, which have always suffered the limits of the partiality of perspectives, geographical or chronological, of the doctrine which expressed them. In fact, the definition provided in the Compilation of Justinian (D. 2.15 and C.2.4), does not identify a specific type of contract based on the content of one or both services, but only the different types of "transigere", related to the abstract verb form. After all, it is just the variety of the contents deductible in the concessions to end the dispute that has led the glossators before, and the commentators then, to consider the transaction a generic cause of asset allocation, such as to characterize, in addition to ours, also other contracts or legal acts. However, on a theoretical level, the identification in the doctrine of the late common law (Fifteenth Century) of the transactio as a contractus innominatus, then provided with its own special rules, can no longer accept this "reductive" opinion, but requires a different approach, fully developed by the humanities thought (Sixteenth Century). Actually, any provision or obligation applies when compromise is agreed as a concession to overcome a dispute between contractors, while the performances do not have as a parameter the substantial situation, but they must be evaluated in connection with the way the conflict shows up. Then, the transaction is apart from the determination of the right and the wrong, and besides some sporadic intervention of opposite sign, like those of Cujas and Hotman, in this historical phase it is common to exclude the ability of individuals to make value judgments about the qualification of their demeanors. Instead, it is the dispute which provides the support to the asset allocations arranged as a result of the transaction: so, the successful execution of a performance, added to the favor dirimendarum litium, fulfills the lack of balance between conflicting interests and ensures the balance of synallagma, as well as the action for the fulfillment of the convention. Accordingly, the dispute, amplified in the pages of Alciato, Connan and Doneau, up to the next, is the premise of the transaction. It allows the renunciation of the right to be swallowed up, in total or in part, by the waiver of the claim, so that the right "set" with the transaction cannot, in the future, be exercised in terms different from those resulting from the agreement. By the way, if everyone agrees on the require of the dispute, there is no unambiguous guidance about its specification. Hence comes a greater or lesser extension of the scope of the transactio, pushed up by somebody to the verification of any incertitudinis aliud genus, even apart from a dispute between the parties. Besides the texture, often contradictory, and the clarifications proposed by the doctrine of modern controversy, the strong polysemy, which is the main quality of the verb transigere, from the Fifteenth Century onwards does no longer concern the history of the signifier transactio. The doubts that can still be perceived will all cover the role of the contract claim, posing again, in the following centuries, the risk of eliminating the entire typical negotiation pattern, as the double textual tradition, embraced by the French and the Austrian coding, still hands us down. But this will be the subject of another work.

Lo studio qui proposto intende prendere le distanze dai molteplici significati della forma verbale astratta (transigere) e liberare cosi’ una definizione dell’istituto transattivo che possa godere di una crescente autonomia quale figura contrattuale dotata di una dignità giuridica propria. Il lavoro, complessivamente diviso in una parte prima (secc. XV-XVI) e seconda (secc. XVII-XIX, di imminente pubblicazione), è stato quindi dedicato alle identità e differenze terminologiche necessarie per convalidare l’esistenza di una realtà storica legata alla “transactio”, diversa ed indipendente dal primitivo arco polisemico su cui si erano arenati i primi legisti bolognesi. Già nel Quattrocento, infatti, si colgono i primi sintomi di aggiornamento degli strumenti ermeneutici, ma è solo nel XVI secolo, nella variegata esposizione dei maestri del cultismo transalpino, che l’approccio storico-filologico appare in grado di superare le impostazioni tradizionali. La riflessione cinquecentesca trasferisce il piano del dibattito da quello processuale a quello sostanziale. Supera le questioni legate alle possibili modalità di conclusione dell’accordo compositivo e si concentra sulla causa del vincolo obbligatorio, affinchè esso tenga per sempre. Nella letteratura umanistica, in altre parole, la transactio tende ad assumere la veste che le sarà poi propria nella sistematica codicistica che qui affonda, come meglio vedremo nella parte seconda, le proprie origini storiche.