According to the former French Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, the reform will “clarify the principles on which the law of contract is founded, reorganise the provisions so as to render the Civil Code more readable and introduce some modifications. It is going also to permit the law of contract to be made more protective of the most vulnerable people. It is a reform guided by the will to put into the Civil Code more justice and solidarity1”. Nevertheless, some have expressed fears that the reform may discourage foreign investors from conducting transactions under French law.

In reality, the changes brought by the reform will, for the most part, merely codify solutions conceived and applied by French courts over recent years. Indeed, until now, the development of French contract law has taken place outside the Civil Code. Some principles of contract law have been developed from doctrinal concepts, such as the distinction between obligations of means (“obligation de moyens”) and of results (“obligation de résultat ”). Other developments are found in other codes, for instance, the new forms of special contracts (“contrats spéciaux”) introduced by the Construction Code. The French Cour de Cassation has itself established a number of new rules. However, the fundamental provisions of contract law laid down by the Civil Code have remained unchanged, such that the Civil Code no longer reflected the law as applied by the courts.

Since 1904, several attempts to produce a draft reform of the Civil Code have been made over the years. In 2005, an academic group published a draft bill to reform the law of obligations and limitations (“Avant-projet de réforme du droit des obligations et de la prescription”), paving the way for a series of other drafts. Finally, in February 2015 and after 15 months of debate, the French government obtained legislative authority from Parliament to reform the Civil Code by way of enabling legislation, which allows regulations to be