Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Contracts

to be used as a prostitute, or renting a property back to its previous owner). The contract often today called “hire” (in Latin locatio con ductio , something like “leasing out/hiring”) raises many of the same issues as sale, but has a broader set of applications [5, 6] . The basic idea is the exchange of a price for temporary use of a thing or of someone’s labor. Its main use in case of things was to rent out real estate. When it was used for labor, there were two configurations. One could hire persons, normally on a daily basis, for unspecified tasks, or hire out an entire task (say, the building of a house) to someone. These would correspond to contracts for day laborers and general contractors, respectively. The price apparently had to be a fixed amount of money, as in sale [5] . (Here there was another agricultural exception; rents for farm land might be a share of the produce.) The term was fixed by agreement, though the contract could be renewed at will or even tacitly. A person renting some property or con tracting for a job had legal responsibilities for the upkeep of the property and the appropriate completion of the work, respec tively. The person hiring laborers was, of course, obligated to pay them. The person renting out property was required to do what he could to allow the tenant to have use of it. The nature of this obligation brings out an important point about this contract. The tenant had enforceable rights with respect to the landlord, but not to the property itself. So, for instance, the new owner of a building had no obligations to rental ten ants who occupied it. If he evicted them or changed the terms of their leases, they could sue the previous owner/landlord for

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