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This paper aims to compare the remedies at the consumer's disposal in the event of a lack of conformity of goods in Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian law. The Slovenian and Croatian legislators have already transposed Directive (EU) 2019/771 in 2022 and 2021, respectively. On the other hand, the rules of the Serbian Consumer Protection Act are still based on Directive 1999/44/ EC. This Directive, however, also shaped the Slovenian and Croatian legislation long before the latest amendments. For this reason, the paper also analyses the rules in Slovenian and Croatian law which were in force before the recent amendments. The principal aim of the authors is to determine the similarities, peculiarities, and differences between the three legal systems. At present, the common denominator of the examined laws is the existence of a hierarchy of consumer rights: repair and replacement are the primary, and appropriate price reduction and termination of the contract the secondary or subsidiary remedies. Before the amendments in 2022 and 2021, termination of contract was the sole subsidiary remedy in Slovenian and Croatian law. It may be inferred that the most important differences between the examined legal orders concern the possibility of the termination of the contract, since the Slovenian and Serbian legislators considerably facilitated it when the lack of conformity becomes evident shortly after the delivery of the goods. Conversely, in Croatian law the emergence of non-conformity in a short period after the delivery does not immediately prompt the termination of contract. Presently, only Croatian law obliges the consumer, except in specific cases, to fix an additional period of reasonable length in which the seller can still perform the contract before the consumer's statement aimed at the termination of the contract gains legal effect.

The paper gives a comparison of the concept of moral (non-material) damage in the Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian law. In Serbia, with some amendments, the 1978 Obligations Act is still in force. However, these have not modified the notion of moral damage: moral damage must have, as a consequence, a meaningful distress in the injured party's intimate sphere, manifested either in bodily pain, mental pain or fear. Infringement of personality rights itself does not give rise to claim for compensation, if not manifested in at least one of the three categories. The basic consequence of this approach is that legal persons are not considered to be able to sustain moral damage, hence they cannot claim compensation either. In the Draft of the Civil Code a certain shift towards the objectivization of the concept can be identified. Such tendency is supported in the recent doctrine as well (M. Karanikić Mirić). In the Croatian Obligations Act from 2005 the notion of moral damage is defined purely objectively: infringement of personality rights. The Slovenian Obligations Code, in defining moral damage, basically retained the trichotomy of bodily pain, mental pain and fear, inherited from the 1978 OA, but supplemented it with the infringement of personality rights. Both in the Croatian OA and Slovenian OC, legal persons are entitled explicitly to claim compensation for moral damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No case of fiduciary transfer of property is explicitly governed by the effective Serbian law. Only the fiduciary assignment of claim is regulated in the Law on Obligations. One specific kind of fiduciary contracts is however frequently concluded, the fiduciary transfer of property as collateral. The case law is all but unanimous that such contracts are to be considered invalid (either entirely or partially), mainly because they infringe the prohibition of lex commissoria, although there are some decisions in which the reason of nullity is found in the infringement of the requirement of a valid cause of contract. Even in the rare cases, in which such contracts are not considered invalid, their legal effect is rendered equal to the effect of the pledge. The question of admissibility of fiduciary transfer of property as collateral is thoroughly discussed in the literature. The majority, under the influence of Dragoljub Aranđelović, claim that such a contract is valid, on the one hand, since it does not infringe upon any statutory prohibition, nor is it contrary to public policy or morals. On the other hand, it is also expedient, since it provides greater security for the creditor than the pledge. A contrary standpoint is taken by Andria Gams, who emphasized that European civil law is characteristic of conformity of economic purpose and legal form of legal institutions, that fiduciary transfer of property is contrary to, hence contemporary law should part with it. The author of this paper asserts that the positive attitude of Serbian doctrine towards the fiduciary transfer of property emerged in the era in which the legal necessity of pledging chattel without the transfer of its possession was not satisfactorily solved. He opines that by adopting the Law on Chattel Mortgage in 2003 ceases the otherwise legitimate need to regulate by statute the fiduciary transfer of property as collateral or to have it recognized in the case law. However, it seems reasonable to regulate, as a general legal institution, the other main type of fiduciary contracts, the fiduciary transfer of property for the purpose of managing other's assets, that is the institution of trust. In this respect, the contemporary notion of trust from common law seems to be an appropriate general model to follow, with some reasonable adjustments to the principles of civil law, naturally. Trust has proved its merits in common law to such an extent that, regardless of serious conceptual differences between common law and civil law, some recent projects for the development of civil law have proposed model rules by which it could be transposed into European civil law, therefore into Serbian law as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide range of directives and regulations of the European Union on the protection of environment is based on several principles, traditionally divided into two groups: the principles of environmental policy and the principles of implementation of measures aiming to protect the environment. The former are the principles of sustainable development and high protection of the environment, while the latter the principle of subsidiarity and proportionality, principle of environmental integration, precautionary principle, principle of prevention, the principle of rectification of environmental damage at its source and the "polluter pays" principle. In this paper the subject of analysis are only the principles of environmental policy. The content of the notion of sustainable development is not outlined in the primary and secondary sources of EU law, but in political acts of international and community origin. It is defined as development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The basic problem in the interpretation of this concept is to indentify standards based on which given activities may be considered as development compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and to project such potential needs. The principle of high level of protection of the environment is not easier to interpret either. The elements of its content that seems to be undisputed and generally recognized is that it should not to be interpreted as the highest possible level of protection, on the one hand, and that it should be determined according to standards adopted by countries that have more developed environmental protection, preferably, but not necessarily members of the European Union, on the other. The greatest insufficiency of both principles, which virtually compromises their legal nature and hence hinders implementation of direct legal sanctions, is that they, besides ecological, comprise economic and social considerations as well. The author approves the standpoint adopted in literature that by elimination of economic and social considerations from notions of sustainable development and high level protection of the environment, or at least by a decrease in their importance, and a strengthening of ecological considerations, these principle might become legal rules with direct legal sanctions, i.e. the Court of Justice might annul directives and regulations not in compliance with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author gives an overview of the regulation of compulsory licence in international and Serbian sources of patent law. From international sources the subjects of analysis are the Paris Convention, TRIPS Agreement and the Community Patent Convention, whereby the last one has not come into force yet, but also contains rules on compulsory license. As far as Serbian law is concerned, all patent laws are analysed, from the first one adopted as early as 1922 in the first Yugoslavia, until the effective Patent Law from 2011. The evolution of compulsory licence is traditionally paralleled to the institution of forfeiture of patent. As the forfeiture of patent, as a sanction against the patent owner who does not intend to exploit the invention, was gradually losing its significance, so were the rules on compulsory licence becoming more detailed and nuanced. Nevertheless, at present compulsory licence is an instrument rarely applied in practice. This is primarily true of cases of compulsory licences that are usually referred to as classical, such as the one issued when the patent holder does not exploit the invention or exploits it insufficiently and the one issued for the purpose of exploitation of a dependent patent, on the one hand, and the compulsory licence issued in public interest in narrower sense, on the other. It is to be expected, however, that two latest subcategories of compulsory licence, the one issued as a remedy for the infringement of the rules of competition and the one issued for the production of medicines for the purpose of export into countries with problems relating to public health, will be applied more frequently in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the French Civil code, the German Civil code belongs to the group of so-called anti-causalistic codifications, since it explicitly does not govern the issue of purpose (cause) of contract. Due to this very reason, the delineation between abstract and causal juridical acts gains special importance in German law. The German Civil Code governs a number of juridical acts and other acts of legal importance that are abstract in their nature. Among them the abstract nature of the promise to fulfill an obligation (Schuldversprechung) and the acknowledgement of a debt (Schuldannerkennung) is traditionally considered the most prominent. However, the relation to the purpose for which they are concluded is not entirely interrupted, since in the case of frustration of their purpose, any asset given to the other party is subject to restitution under the rules of unjustified enrichment. The fact that the issue of purpose of contract is not explicitly governed in the German Civil Code, does not lead to the conclusion, though, that it is legally irrelevant. It gains legal relevance in two different aspects: as a licit and as an illicit purpose. On the one hand, juridical acts concluded with the aim to achieve illicit purposes are considered void, for which the Code's sections on the general confines of the principle of freedom of contract serve the statutory basis - such juridical acts infringe the institution of "good customs" (gute Sitten), usually referred to as public policy, while the performance of other factual or legal acts in order to achieve illicit purposes are sanctioned under the rules of unjustified enrichment. On the other hand, lawful purposes of the parties gain legal relevance in relation to a range of various institutions. Concerning some of them the Code itself contains formulations implying the necessity to ascertain the purpose of contract, while in other cases the case law and the doctrine have come to such conclusion. The determination of the purpose of contract in the context of these institutions either secures the fulfilment of the purpose of assumption of contractual obligation of one of the parties or rectifies the consequences of the frustration of the fulfilment of that purpose. In this range surely the most important institutions are the collapse of the basis of transaction or frustration of purpose (Störung der Geschäftsgrundlage), a special case of discharge of contract due to impossibility, whereby the purpose of contract is realized without the performance of debtor's obligation, a special case of unjustified enrichment due to frustration of the result aimed by the purpose of the transaction and the invalidity of standard business terms that jeopardize the fulfillment of the purpose of contract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author gives an overview of the development from abstract to causal juridical acts and explains the abstract legal effect of juridical acts in present-day European civil law (in the law of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France). He concludes that in contemporary law juridical acts cannot have full abstract legal effect, as in archaic legal orders, because modern legal orders do not allow the creation of claims and debts in a way that entirely excludes the possibility to scrutinize whether a juridical act is null and void for the infringement of public order by its aim. In relation to the law of Serbia, the author refers to the difference between juridical acts that create obligations, that is claims and debts, and acts by which the parties merely dispose of the claims and debts already imposed. This division of juridical acts has its origins in the German legal culture, but it is fairly applicable to the Serbian law, as well. The author points out that the requirement of the Law on obligations, that all juridical acts must have a valid cause, applies without exception to juridical acts imposing an obligation (the so-called Verpflichtungsgeschäfte), regardless of whether they are concluded in the form of an abstract of causal act, i.e. whether the purpose of the transaction is determinable from their content. In this context he refers to the standpoint adopted in the doctrine that the cause of juridical acts gains relevance by three means: by the agreement of the parties, objection of the respondent and when the court determines ex officio whether the contract is contrary to public order. The author supports the point of view that in Serbian law juridical acts aimed merely to disposing of claims and debts already imposed (the so-called Verfügungsgeschäfte) may have a legal effect, which is independent from their cause. For these reasons, the author is of the opinion that in present-day legal orders, hence in Serbian law too, it is more appropriate to use the phrase "abstract legal effect of a juridical act", which refers to a legal effect of an act, whereby the relevance of its cause is reduced or even eliminated, instead of the collocation "abstract juridical act", which connotes a specific type of juridical act, one entirely independent from its cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of the Law on Obligations in 1978 can certainly be considered as an event of watershed importance in respect to the analysis of various theoretical points of view on the notion of cause (consideration) of contract in the Serbian literature. The fact that it had not been explicitly regulated in Serbian positive law until the adoption of Law had a profound impact on the evolution of doctrine in this period. The range of differing theoretical points of view was very wide, covering essentially all the relevant streams in the doctrine of cause, from the ones accepting it (so-called causalistic theories), through the ones explaining it solely by the notion of exchange of assets (so-called economic theories), to the ones denying its legal significance in any sense (socalled anticausalistic theories). The most distinguished authorities in Serbian literature of contract law, who studied the notion of cause of contract in the period until the promulgation of the Law, were Dragoljub Aranđelović, Živojin Perić, Lazar Marković, Andrija Gams, Stevan JakšIć, Vladimir Kapor and Mihailo Konstantinović The Law on Obligations explicitly regulates the notion of cause of contract as one of the preconditions of validity and effect of a contract, which had a substantial impact on the evolution of doctrine. On the one hand, being an institution of positive law, there is hardly an author who had not devoted some attention to the notion of cause of contract. In this paper the author analyzes the points of view of Stojan Cigoj, Ljubiša Milošević, Živomir Đorđević, Boris Vizner, Martin Vedriš, Želimir Šmalcelj, Jakov RadišIć, Slobodan Perović, Jožef Salma and Oliver Antić. On the other hand, the scope of various, often conflicting, theories on cause of contract in Serbian literature shrank. One can recognize a tendency of abandonment of points of view disavowing any legal relevance of cause of contract and the majority of contemporary authorities argue that the cause of contract is a necessary legal institution, although they differ in the conceptual determination of this notion. However, Boris Vizner and Martin Vedriš may in this respect be deemed an exception. The former is of the opinion that the relevant sections of the Law on Obligations do not regulate the notion of cause of contract, but different titles of acquiring rights (titulus), while the latter claims that they mean the notion of basis of juridical act (Geschäftsgrundlage) from the German doctrine of civil law. All other authorities maintain that the sections of the Law on Obligations on the basis of obligation refer to the French notion of cause of contract and define it mainly within the premises of the neoclassical theory of cause of contract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this paper gives an overview of the evolution of legal framework of protection of rights of inventors in Serbia, since the end of the 19th century to present day. Special attention is paid to the legislative bill of the new patent law, adopted by the Serbian Government in the beginning of July, 2011. This paper was written in the period after the Bill had been adopted, but before the parliamentary debate began. From the new legal institutions envisaged by the Bill the author points out in detail the obligation to issue a research report (report on the state of the art) before the publication of the patent application, evening up the petty patent and patent in respect of the inventive step of the invention as a condition of patentability, differentiation between petty patent and examined petty patent in respect of the right of the applicant to request interim court measures to prohibit unauthorized economic exploitation of the invention, changes in the wording of some sections of the law necessitated by entry in force of the European Patent Convention, introduction of right of appeal of the applicant against the administrative decisions of the Intellectual Property Office, prescribing explicitly the right of review as an extraordinary legal remedy in litigations initiated for the protection of the rights of patent holders, enabling restoration of rights (restitutio in integrum) in the case of failure to pay annual fees for maintenance of patent rights, introduction of the institution of „continuation of procedure", assignment of the administration of the registry of pledged patent rights, rights from petty patent and rights conferred by the patent application into the competence of Intellectual Property Office, and other novelties necessitates by the requirement of harmonization of domestic legislation with the sections of the TRIPS agreement and the Directive of the EU No. 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of intellectual property rights in respect of the measures for the protection of the rights of patent holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author analyzes the different points of view on the notion of cause (consideration) in contract in the Serbian doctrine of civil law as until the adoption of the Law on Obligations in 1978. Having in mind that the Law, adhering to the normative solutions of the French Civil Code, explicitly regulates the institution of cause of contract, as one of the conditions of formation and validity of contract, its adoption can certainly be considered as an event of a watershed importance in respect of the analysis of various theoretical points of view on the notion of cause of contract in the Serbian literature. The fact that the institution of cause of contract had not been explicitly regulated in Serbian positive law as until the adoption of Law on Obligations had its effect on the evolution of doctrine in this period in two ways. On one hand, the range of differing theoretical points of view was very wide, covered as good as all the relevant streams in the doctrine of cause, from the ones accepting this institution (so-called causalistic theories) to the ones denying its legal significance in any sense (so-called anticausalistic theories). By the adoption of the Law on Obligations in 1978 the notion of cause of contract became a legal institution in Serbian positive law that had a profound impact on the evolution of doctrine. On one hand, the cause of contract was not a neglectable legal notion any more, therefore it seems entirely logical that there is as good as no authority since then who has not dedicated to the notion of cause of contract an article or two, or at least a separate part in their textbooks. On the other hand, the determination of the legislator to assign the Serbian legal system to the family of legal systems in which the notion of cause of contract is stipulated as one of conditions of formation and validity of contract, led to the shrinkage of the diapason of various, often conflicting, points of view on cause of contract in the Serbian literature. In contrast to the period before the adoption of the Law on Obligations, after its adoption a tendency of abandonment of points of view disavowing any legal relevance of cause of contract can be recognized and the majority of contemporary authorities argue that the cause of contract is a necessary legal institution, although they may differ in the conceptual determination of this notion. In the period after the adoption of the Law on Obligations in the Serbian literature of law of contract many authorities analyzed various aspects of cause of contract, especially Professors Stojan Cigoj, Ljubiša Milošević, Živomir Đordevic, Boris Vizner, Martin Vedriš, Želimir Šmalcelj, Jakov Radišic, Slobodan Perovic, Jožef Salma, Oliver Antic and others. The author in this paper gives an overview of the points of view of authorities in the Serbian literature of law contract on the notion of cause of contract who marked the period until the adoption of the Law on Obligations, namely the works of Professors Dragoljub Arandelovic, Živojin Peric, Lazar Marković, Andrija Gams, Stevan Jakšic, Vladimir Kapor and Mihajlo Konstantinović. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the basic tenets of the law of contract in countries that belong to the legal family of common law is that only such contractual promises are legally enforceable that are concerned with future promises, which means that contractual duties (at least one obligation of one of the parties) must pertain to performance in future. However, common law went a long way until it has reached the position that future promises are to be legally enforceable. This development is to be analyzed necessarily in the light of the so-called writ-system of common law, since until the end of 19th century, at common law a claim under substantive law existed only if the creditor had a chose in action, i.e. was entitled to submit a specific type of action (writ) to the court (action fit obligation). The first step in developing a general basis for enforcing future promises may have been found in action of covenant. The covenant was, however, similarly to stipulation of Roman law, a legal act subject to strict formalities; therefore any failure to observe the formalities hindered the enforceability of the covenant. In some sense, the action of debt could also be regarded as a vehicle for development of a basis for the enforcement of future promises, but it was also subject to a fundamental limitation. Namely, similarly to real contracts of Roman law, action of debt entitled the claimant to judicial protection of the promise made to him by the respondent, only if the claimant himself has rendered his performance beforehand, since the fundamental feature of real contracts is that the performance of claimant's promise is not considered only as an act of performing a contract, but also as an act of formation of a contract. Common law reaches the general basis for enforcing future promises only with the emergence of action of assumpsit, more precisely, with one of its special types, the indebitatus assumpsit. The process of developing a general basis for enforcing contracts under which none of the parties has rendered performance (so-called executory contracts) reaches its end in 1602 in Slade's case, in which the court settled that a party to a contract may always submit an action of assumpsit if the parties have reached a bargain, i.e. each and every bargain imports in itself an assumpsit. With Slade's case a new legal institution has emerged at common law, the notion of consideration, which even today delimits legally enforceable contractual promises from all other contract-like agreements that do not enjoy legal protection, legally unenforceable natural obligations. Consideration furnishes the bargain with such essential feature that renders it legally enforceable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A contract is, in principle, formed by the device of offer and acceptance. The offeror dispatches their offer to the offeree, a proposal containing all the essential elements needed for the formation of a given type of contract, after which the offeree has the initiative to conclude a contract by accepting the offer or end the negotiation phase by rejecting it. However, a question arises whether the offeror can revoke their offer once it has become effective, i.e. once it has reached the offeree. Various legal systems take a different path in this respect and the problem of a binding nature of an offer has produced three different solutions. On one hand, in countries belonging to German legal culture (Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the present research) the offeror is most strongly bound, meaning that they cannot actually revoke an effective offer. On the other hand, legal systems belonging to Romanistic legal culture (France and Italy in this paper) adopt a somewhat liberal standpoint: the offeror may under certain conditions withdraw an effective offer. And, finally, there is the approach of common law, which adopts a completely "aleatory view of negotiations", in the meaning that the offeror may at any time before acceptance revoke their offer without any consequences - no obligation for any party arises before the formation of the contract, whatsoever. The issue of revocation of an effective offer may be brought in correlation with the institution of liability for damages caused by conducting negotiations in bad faith (culpa in contrahendo). Namely, even if the offeror is in position to revoke their offer and, hence, preclude the formation of a contract, the revocation itself may cause damage to the offeree. The question appears whether the offeror should be liable for the damages suffered by the offeree, in the amount of their reliance interest. Different legal systems take a different course on this issue. Since the revocation of an effective offer is not possible under German, Austrian and Swiss law, in these countries the issue of liability for damages caused by revocation simply doesn't appear. Under French and Italian law, the revocation of an effective offer is possible, but it will inevitably lead to offeror's liability for the damage caused to the offeree by the revocation. Finally, under common law the revocation of offer is, in principle, almost always possible and it will lead to offeror's liability for damages only exceptionally, provided specific circumstances exist. Under Serbian law the offeror is bound by their offer, i.e. an effective offer cannot be revoked. Since it cannot be revoked (any statement of the offeror on the revocation is without legal effect), the offeror's liability for conducting negotiations in bad faith in this case simply cannot arise in this case, just as in other countries belonging to German legal culture, where Serbian law undoubtedly belongs to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the fundamental notions of law of contract at common law is certainly the institution of consideration. In order to have a legally binding and enforceable promise, it must be supported by consideration. If the promise lacks consideration, it will be held unenforceable, unless another ground of enforceability is present. The other two possible grounds for recovery are the requirements of form and the institution of promissory estoppel. This paper deals with the latter one. The author first analyses the notion of promissory estoppel, its historical background in the American and English law and differences between promissory and equitable estoppels. Secondly, attention is paid to the regulation of promissory estoppel in the §90 of the First and Second Restatement of Contracts, relevant case-law and doctrine. Finally, the author makes an attempt to determine the legal nature of liability based upon promissory estoppel (whether it is an institution of contract law or tort law), on one hand, and the degree of liability measured by the standards of restitution, reliance or expectation interest, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]