Negotiorum gestio: Roman foundations of unauthorized management of another's affairs in Serbian civil law

Abstract

Negotiorum gestio is a legal institute that originates from Roman law. It still exists today and in the legal literature we find a term that defines it as: the unauthorized performance of another's affairs, i.e., agency without authority. The institute of negotiorum gestio has been continuously used and is the subject of legal regulation in most countries of the continental, European legal systems, including the law of the Republic of Serbia, for more than two millennia. The aim of this paper is to compare the solutions from Roman and contemporary law of obligations using the normative, descriptive, comparative and analytical-synthetic scientific methods. The paper is divided into three parts: the first part, which deals with the Roman understanding of the negotiorum gestio institute, the second part, which presents the current solutions regarding this institute contained in the Law of Contract and Torts of the Republic of Serbia, and the third part, which, using a comparative and the historical method, draws conclusions about whether current solutions contained in contemporary law are better than those that were applied in the ancient period.