Abstract

This work presents contract law’s transit in the Latin American legal context. Despite the nineteenth-century codifications which ostensibly subscribed to individualistic parameters, with which our modern contract law was designed, the region’s contemporary codification has distanced itself from this manner of comprehending the contract, its legal bases and purposes, consolidating itself with exigencies of sociability and other social principles This is particularly analyzed from the standpoint of the embodiment of the social role that contracts have in today’s Brazilian legislation, which poses difficulties to the effectiveness of contracts’ binding force, and other contractual principles. How this phenomenon reveals the complexity of contract law is presented herein, posing an immediate challenge for the efforts towards harmonization of contract law in Latin America, considering a common basis.

Keywords

contractual binding force contract’s social function individualism sociability Latin American contract law