The service contract : a challenge of the European movement of recodification of contract law

The services contract, on the basis of the general definition given by the French Civil Code (Art. 1710), is defined by the French case law as a contract whereby a person called the contractor undertakes the obligation to carry out definite work for the account of a principal, in consideration for a remuneration, and without being either an agent or an employee of the principal. The economic importance of the service contract is at present unfortunately not relayed by a clearly determined legal nature or a strong and consistent regime. These shortcomings call for a proposal of reform. We could then choose between proposing either a reform of the services contract law, contained in the existing civil law, or a solution that is part of a broader reform of the law of specific contracts. Those two alternatives are each underpinned by a different vision of the legal system. Indeed, to propose a reform of the law of the services contract inside the existing positive law comes back to giving priority to the typological vision, full of redundancies and shortcomings, of contractual types. We have preferred to follow the spirit of the Civil Code of 1804, a spirit that is underlain by exigencies of completion and openness for the legal system, so as to propose a new nature and a new regime for the services contract which itself is part of a more widely spread reform of the law of special contracts based on classification.