Expediency of Consolidating Conditional Fulfillment of an Obligation in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation

Abstract

A study of the institution of conditional performance of obligations has shown that, although in the legal systems of some States obligations are called conditional, we are talking about conditional transactions. Russia is the only state that, along with «conditional transactions,» has established «conditional obligations» in the meaning of the obligation consolidated in Article 307 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The experience of using this approach has shown its inconsistency, since in practice situations arise that violate the balance of interests between the parties to the contract. For this reason, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation was forced to cancel the effect of this norm, indicating that the occurrence of an obligation should be linked not to the fact of the occurrence of a condition, but to the expected date of its occurrence. After such an interpretation, the conditionality of the fulfillment of the obligation provided for in Article 327.1 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation ceased to be conditional. An unconditional transaction is the cause (causa) of the obligation from the moment it is made. This means that suspension is unusual for an unconditional transaction. In contrast, a transaction with a suspensive condition acquires the properties of the cause (causa) only from the moment the condition occurs. Therefore, for such a transaction, the state of suspension is normal. Among other things, the author concludes that the current legal regulation of relations for the provision of paid services with the achievement of results is carried out using the norms of Article 327.1 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. It is difficult to agree with this approach, since failure to achieve the result of the service will mean that one party has fulfilled its obligations under a paid contract to perform certain actions or carry out certain activities (paragraph 1 of Article 779 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation), and the other party is exempt from paying for it.