1867 - 1867

Viscount of Seabra’s Civil Code

King Dom Luís I approved the Civil Code by “Letter of Law” of 1^st July 1867.

The insurance contract has not been forgotten in this new Code, and Chapter VII has introduced the definition of a random contract as “…that, by which one person commits himself or herself to another, or both commit themselves to one another, to render or do a certain thing, given a certain uncertain future act or event”.

According to Article 1538, a random contract is said to be a risk or insurance contract when the benefit is compulsory and certain for one of the parties, the other party being obliged to provide or do something in return, if an uncertain event arises.

In matters of insurance, there are some divergences between the requirements established in the Commercial Code of 1833 and the new Civil Code, because Ferreira Borges considered all insurance contracts to be commercial, whereas the Civil Code establishes a distinction between commercial and non-commercial insurance contracts, the latter being regulated by the general rules of contracts established by the referred Code.

Image caption
Viscount of Seabra
Portrait extracted from “Wikipédia – António Luís de Seabra”
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Lu%C3%ADs_de_Seabra