INNOMINATE CONTRACTS IN COMPANY LAW: Contractual atipicity between socially typical agreements and new ventures.
Innominate contracts; Business contracts; Business customs; New business ventures.
The present thesis seeks to investigate the ways by which the freedom to produce innominate business contracts is constructed within the Brazilian legal framework, particularly considering the dichotomy between business customs and new business ventures. In order to pursue this objective, this thesis is structured upon a set of fundamental pillars, from which one intends to construct a path of critical appreciation of literature and jurisprudence concerning innominate business contracts, aiming towards reconstructing the doctrinal assumptions surrounding these transactions. These pillars include outlining the main lines of the General Theory of Business Contracts, by demonstrating the characteristics of the so-called typological method; evaluating the role of established customs and their relevance in shaping socially nominate contracts, and critically analyzing the methodologies for handling innominate contracts, in order to realign these strategies with the general guidelines that govern business contracts. Thus, this thesis seeks to address the theoretical deficit in the literature regarding innominate business contracts, concerning the methodologies for handling those agreements. This deficit is primarily due to the difficulty of the aforementioned methodologies in aligning with the social and economic pressures that lead to the creation of new legal models instead of relying on general clauses with limited explanatory capacity or regimes that are incompatible with those contemplated by economic agents. Thus, this thesis aims to contribute to the collective effort in constructing a General Theory of Business Contracts with some reflections on contractual atypicality, aiming to more clearly delineate the peculiarities of new business ventures and socially nominate agreements. It is hoped that the considerations systematically presented here will serve as a starting point for the examination of the subject matter with the complexity it deserves, surpassing initiatives to fill apparent normative gaps with solutions foreign to business practice, as well as perspectives that attribute absolute character to the freedom to contract which are incompatible with the legal framework of markets.