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Beirut Bar Admission Test study materials
Beirut Bar Admission Test study resources

Beirut Bar Admission Test: Civil Law: Obligations, Contracts and Property under the COC

Beirut Bar Admission Test · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Civil Law: Obligations, Contracts and Property under the COC

Civil Law in the Beirut Bar examination tests the Code des Obligations et des Contrats (COC) of 1932 - a Romanist code built on French doctrine - together with the property rules on ownership, usufruct, servitudes and land registration. The paper rewards candidates who move from a fact pattern to the governing rule and justify the result; it punishes those who merely name a doctrine.

Formation and validity

  • Four requirements: consent (offer plus acceptance), capacity, a determinate object, and a licit cause.
  • Vices of consent: erreur, dol (fraud, including bad-faith silence), violence. Lésion rescinds only where the law expressly provides.
  • Nullity: absolute (public order, invocable by any interested party) versus relative (protection of a private party, curable by confirmation).

Effects and liability

  • Force obligatoire and effet relatif; performance must be in good faith.
  • Breach requires faute, préjudice and lien de causalité. Contractual and delictual liability are distinct regimes; exemption clauses cannot cover dol or gross negligence.
  • Force majeure requires an external, unforeseeable and irresistible event. Imprévision is rejected in civil matters, unlike in administrative contracts.
  • Extinction: payment, set-off, novation, merger, release, and prescription - ten years as the residual period.

Property

Ownership carries usus, fructus and abusus. Real rights over immovables are transferred between the parties by contract but become opposable to third parties only through registration at the Conservation foncière.

Worked example

Seller S signs a notarised sale of an apartment to buyer B, who pays in full but does not register. S's creditor C later registers an attachment against S. B loses priority: the conflict between B and C is resolved by the date of registration, not by the date of the deed.

Traps

Treating cause as consideration; invoking imprévision in an ordinary civil contract; forgetting registration; assuming a clause pénale is untouchable when a judge may adjust it.