Nemo potest venire contra factum proprium. The coherence principle in European contract law.

The coherence principle was elaborated by the legal scholar Dimitri Houtcieff in the field of contract law of the French legal system as an instrument for overcoming those contradictions regarding the contract or the contractual behavior which may be damaging for the other party or even for third parties. The coherence principle relies on the hypothesis that a contract, as the agreement of the parties, is a coherent system, and that whatever contradictions it may contain are irreducible oppositions within the system, deriving either from certain explicit provisions in the contract or from the behavior of the party, which can affect the dynamics of the contract in various ways. The article intends to elaborate on the notion of contractual contradiction as it was developed in the French doctrine, to analyze such contradictions in the French contract law and to verify, on the one hand, if there can be established any relation of equivalence between the legal notions employed in the French legal doctrine and the Romanian one, and, on the other hand, if the coherence principle may prove to be applicable in the Romanian contract law as an equally useful tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]