Droit Privé: Liability for the Provision of Services Involving Products simon whittaker

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198256137.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter looks at how French private law governs the liabilities of a number of other categories of person for products which are involved in the provision of a service in a very broad sense. This involvement may consist of the transfer of a product from one person to another, as where goods are provided as part of the provision of a wider service, as in a restaurant meal, building a house, or hiring a boat; while sometimes the product is the subject matter of the service in a different sense, as in the case of the designer of a car, or the consultant surveyor of a new building. In French law, all the cases treated here find a common basis in the contrat de louage (‘hire’ in a very general sense), which, following its Romanist origins, then divides into the hire of things (louage des choses, whether these are movable or immovable); the hire of services (contrat de louage d’ouvrage, but now more frequently contrat d’enterprise); and contracts of employment (louage de service, now termed contrat de travail). The chapter considers examples of the first two, the present discussion being restricted to private law; it looks later at the law governing the provision of public services (whether this law is private or administrative). Very little of the private law governing liability of the provider of a service stems from the Civil Code as originally drafted, but rather reflects modern legislative and judicial developments.

Keywords:   private law, liability law, service provision, construction, services

Apart from liability under the general law of delictual fault, so far I have looked at the way in which French law imposes liability for products on two particularly important categories of person: their gardiens (typically their owners)¹ through the law of delict and on their sellers, whether immediate or more remote, through the law of contract.² In this chapter, I shall look at how French private law governs the liabilities of a number of other categories of person for products which are involved in the provision of a service in a very broad sense. This involvement may consist of the transfer of a product from one person to another, as where goods are provided as part of the provision of a wider service, as in a restaurant meal, building a house or hiring a boat; while sometimes the product is the subject matter of the service in a different sense, as in the case of the designer of a car, or the consultant surveyor of a new building. In French law, all the cases treated here find a common basis in the contrat de louage (‘hire’ in a very general sense), which, following its Romanist origins, then divides into the hire of things (louage des choses, whether these are movable or immovable); the hire of services (contrat de louage d’ouvrage, but now more frequently contrat d’entreprise); and contracts of employment (louage de service, now termed contrat de travail). In this chapter, I shall look at examples of the first two,³ my present discussion being restricted to private law: I shall look later at the law governing the provision of public services (whether this law is private or administrative).⁴ Very little of the private law governing liability of the provider of a service stems from the Civil Code as originally drafted, but rather reflects modern legislative and judicial developments.