The consignment agreement and its planned enactment in law

Abstract

The consignment agreement emerged in Rome where its acceptance and use among travelling merchants was widespread; subsequently, through the process of reception of law, it has entered into modern law, although it has never been contemplated in a legal text. However, it is widely used in retail commerce, regulated, fundamentally, by doctrinal and jurisprudential opinion. At present, there is a preliminary draft law for the enactment of a Commercial Code, prepared by the General Legislation Commission, Second Section of Commercial Law, which, if successful in its legislative journey, will for the first time regulate the consignment agreement in the Spanish legal order. And the contract will be defined under the category of “contracts of collaboration”, which serve as a channel for cooperation between entrepreneurs who develop complementary activities. If such a transcendental law were enacted, it would once again be demonstrated that all those legal questions to which the Roman legal order never managed to arrive at a certain and definitive legal solution, have with the same doubts been passed down to our day and age.