Graduation Address McGill University

Chancellor Arnold Steinberg, Principal Heather Munroe Blum, Chair of the Board Kip Cobbett, Dean Daniel Jutras, Mr. Justice Nicholas Kasirer, distinguished faculty members, parents, friends, and most of all fellow graduates. The theme of my graduation address is legal history and comparative law. Let me very briefly confront you with three characteristic texts and their impact. Some grain merchants sail from Alexandria to the famine-stricken island of Rhodes, where grain has become a very precious commodity. May the merchant whose vessel arrives first sell his grain to the starving Rhodians without indicating that various other vessels are about to arrive with the result that the price of grain will drop dramatically? Or is he under a duty of disclosure? This is a problem raised by Marcus Tullius Cicero in his work De officiis and it has been discussed, over the centuries, by generations of lawyers. Today it is as relevant as it was in Roman times, in France or Germany as much as in England or Canada. Situations where we have an asymmetrical distribution of information occur particularly frequently in business-to-consumer relations. And European Union legislation has thus established a comprehensive system of duties to inform in order to redress that imbalance. The extent of such duties, and whether they also exist in business-to-business relations remains subject to considerable dispute. Passons au deuxième texte. Une personne dépose une épée chez un ami. Quand elle revient trouver son ami après quelques semaines, elle est devenue folle. Ce cas a été discuté, lui aussi, par Cicero. Selon Cicero, l’ami n’est pas obligé de rendre l’épée. C’est un texte étudié avec la même intensité à travers les siècles que mon premier exemple. Le texte de Cicero constitue l’un des points de départ de la doctrine de la clausula rebus sic stantibus. Celle-ci prévoit que tout contrat conclu est sujet à une condition tacite selon laquelle les circonstances fondamentales, à base desquelles le contrat a été conclu, n’auront pas changé. Cette doctrine a été renforcée par St. Thomas d’Aquin d’un point de vue de la philosophie morale. En effet, St. Thomas d’Aquin ne considérait pas comme pêcher l’inexécution d’un contrat lorsque les circonstances avaient changé. Les rédacteurs du code civil allemand avaient rejeté la doctrine de la clausularebus sic stantibus. Tout de même, ce concept a trouvé sa place dans le droit allemand grâce à la jurisprudence et basé sur le concept général de la bonne foi. Les systèmes plus modernes comme les Principles of European Contract Law proposent des versions intitulées « change of circumstances ». The next case is from a fifteenth century treatise from Naples. A husband secretly enters the room where his dying wife is engaged in making her will. He bends his face over hers and entreats and flatters her into making a legacy of immovable property to him. This legacy was subsequently held to be invalid, and the Neapolitan jurists, in this context, resorted to the notion of metus reverentialis, reverential fear, which had been established in medieval law on the basis of individual points of departure from the Roman sources. In English law, the doctrine of undue influence was developed to cope with this type of situation. In continental legal systems, however, metus reverentialis was forgotten. Courts and legal writers in Germany were thus confronted with a difficulty when they had to deal with cases where a husband persuades his wife to act as surety for his debts vis-à-vis a bank. A decision by the Federal Constitutional Court was required to induce the Federal Supreme Court to invalidate contracts of suretyship far exceeding …