D.I. Meyer and the development of the doctrine of securing obligations

Abstract

In this paper, based on the works of D.I. Meyer – the first Russian civilist and the founder of the Russian School of Civil Law, the emergence, development, and establishment of the legal regulation of obligations in the Russian law and, in particular, of the institution of ensuring the fulfillment of obligations have been analyzed. As a result of the detailed investigation of the current legislation, it has been concluded that the methods of ensuring the fulfillment of obligations include forfeit, pledge, surety, and deposit. Moreover, the work emphasizes that not all measures to ensure obligations are aimed at real stimulation of their fulfillment, being rather of a compensatory nature. It has been noted that in the pre-revolutionary civilistic literature there were no specific discussions of the above problem. D.I. Meyer was the first who formulated and characterized them in a fairly clear form, laying special emphasis on the fact that one of the missions of the institution of securing is to substantiate the contract and increase the negative effect of non-fulfillment of obligations. In this work, in the context of the evolution of the doctrine of securing obligations, the law of the Soviet era has been discussed. One of the conclusions characterizing this period is that, despite some political aspects of the life in society, Soviet lawyers based their research on the work of pre-revolutionary scholars. Notably, these postulates introduced by D.I. Meyer, exist, function, and are in demand today.

Keywords

• civil law
• studies on civil law
• ways of ensuring obligations
• contract