Protection of Weaker Contractual Party Mgr. Jiří Zapletal Disertační práce (2011) The thesis "Ochrana slabšího ve smluvních závazkových vztazích" ("Protection of Weaker Contractual Party") is devoted to the issue of legal protection of weaker contractual parties in private law. Emphasis on the protection of the weaker contractual parties represents one of the most significant trends in modern private law. Despite this fact, the issue of protection of weaker contractual parties as such has not been analyzed by authors of Czech legal literature sufficiently so far and even foreign literature focusing on the issue is not too prevalent. The issue of legal protection of weaker contractual parties is not an exclusive domain of consumer law. Problems resulting from positions of different strength (bargaining power, inequality) of contractual parties occur not only in connection with contracts entered into between business entities and consumers (non-business entities), but also mutually between business entities and, last but not least, in connection with contracts entered into between consumers (non-business entities). Protection of weaker contractual parties is contained in various legal institutions, some of which can be described as traditional, other are almost exclusively achievement of modern...

This master's thesis deals with the concept of the weaker party in private law, especially in

Title: Notion of Consumer in European and Czech Law The main aim of the thesis is to analyze the notion of consumer, to describe its historical evolution and provide solutions de lege ferenda. The notion of consumer, which is crucial for the extent of consumer protection, results from the concept of weaker contracting party. Therefore this thesis firstly deals with its definition, main principles, general enactment in the Civil Code and particular examples of protection of weaker parties. The thesis mainly focuses on legal regulation of the notion of consumer in European law which is exclusively regulated by secondary legislation of the EU. The majority of private law directives is based on the principle of minimum harmonisation and, in accordance with the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, it characterises the consumer as a natural person acting with the entrepreneur out of their professional activity. It is assumed that consumer protection might become more integrated within the internal market of the EU, as well as based on full harmonisation principle or adoption of a general "European Consumer Protection Act". In the Czech Republic, the notion of consumer has been enacted since 1993 and the definition was restricted through a few amendments solely to natural persons. The...

The position of a weaker party in concluding contracts within business transactions The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the specificities of concluding contracts with a weaker party under the New Civil Code. The main focus is given on the issue of contract terms which are forbidden because they cause significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the weaker party. The thesis explains who can be a weaker party, what differences it brings up and what are the consequences of breach of those protectionist provisions of law. The thesis is composed of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. First chapter covers the background information and explains who can be in the position of a weaker party, according to which criteria courts should consider the weakness and when it reaches the level which is relevant for law. Second chapter deals with Section 433 of the new civil code and looks at protection of the weaker party on its basis. It addresses scope of that provision and consequences when a party breaches it. The last part of this chapter concentrates on nullity under the New Civil Code. Chapter three describes position of the weaker party in concluding adhesion contracts and specificities which rise from the fact that the...

The legal protection of clients of financial institutions Abstract The first chapter focuses on the definition of basic concepts essential to the subject of this work. Emphasis was placed on defining the term of client in relation to the notion of a customer who is often used in positive law at both European and national level. Furthermore, the concept of consumer is defined, which is a generally used category of customers and is offered the highest legal protection. The notion of financial institution and the concept of legal protection are also important in defining the scope of this work. Given the diversity of the current financial services market, in the rest of my thesis I have focused only on the most important providers of financial services and the legislation governing their activities. The concept of legal protection is defined in the sense of division into institutional and normative legal protection, with the focus being on normative protection. The aim of the second chapter was to describe the basic aspects of two complementary principles of law as the theoretical basis of legal protection of clients, which are the concept of autonomy of will and the protection of the weaker party. The principle of protection of the weaker party and its modality of consumer protection has been introduced from...

Conclusion of adhesion contracts by entrepreneurs Abstract The aim of this work is to describe the conditions under which the protective provisions of the Civil Code on the conclusion of contracts in an adhesive manner are applied in relations where the entrepreneur acts. In this regard, attention is focused on the definition of the weaker party and the individual conditions that the entrepreneur must meet if he is to enjoy the protection of the weaker party. Subsequently, the work deals with the institute of concluding contracts in an adhesive manner, formulating its individual features and manifestations, especially in commercial practice. This work consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter forms the basis for the rest of this work, by defining the weaker party with an emphasis on relations between entrepreneurs. Furthermore, this form describes the form of protection of the weaker party with an analysis of private and public protection of the weaker entrepreneur. The second chapter deals with contracts concluded in an adhesive manner and burden of proof beard by the contracting party. Subsequently, this work captures the most common forms in contractual practice such as general terms and conditions, form documents or framework contracts. A specific form of adhesion...

Boilerplate contracts made by an entrepreneur Abstract The diploma thesis thematically focuses on an issue of contracts of adhesion which are concluded by entrepreneur in the course of trade. Contracts of adhesion are characterised by a specific, adhesive, method of entering into contracts based on the principle of take it or leave it which relies on the fact that the basic terms of contract are determined by one of the contractual parties which results in reducing the options of the weaker contractual party to full acceptance of unilaterally determined basic terms of contract or to the rejection of the contract as a whole. The aim of this diploma thesis is the presentation of a comprehensive analysis of the legal institute of contracts of adhesion de lege lata which is completed by synthesis of the insights in question into relevant theoretical and practical conclusions, including considerations de lege ferenda. The legal institute of contracts of adhesion with regard to the aim of the diploma thesis is subjected to theoretical analysis from the point of view of historical development, from the point of view of definition of the thematically relevant legal concepts de lege lata which are entrepreneur, weaker entrepreneur, consumer or legal regimes of contractual relations, from the point of view of...

The recent development of multi-core computer architectures has largely affected the creation of everyday applications, requiring the adoption of concurrent programming to significantly utilize the divided processing power of computers. Applications must be split into sections able to execute in parallel, without any of these sections conflicting with one another, thereby necessitating some form of synchronization to be declared. The most commonly used methodology is lock-based synchronization; although, to improve performance the most, developers must typically form complex, low-level implementations for large applications, which can easily create potential errors or hindrances. An abstraction from database systems, known as transactions, is a rising concurrency control design aimed to circumvent the challenges with programmability, composability, and scalability in lock-based synchronization. Transactions execute their operations speculatively and are capable of being restarted (or rolled back) when there exist conflicts between concurrent actions. As such issues can occur later in the lifespans of transactions, entire rollbacks are not that effective for performance. One particular method, known as nesting, was created to counter that drawback. Nesting is the act of enclosing transactions within other transactions, essentially dividing the work into pieces called sub-transactions. These sub-transactions can roll back without affecting the entire main transaction, although general nesting models only allow one sub-transaction to perform work at a time. The first main contribution in this thesis is SPCN, an algorithm that parallelizes nested transactions while automatically processing any potential conflicts that may arise, eliminating the burden of additional processing from the application developers. Two versions of SPCN exist: Strict, which enforces the sub-transactions' work to be made visible in a serialized order; and Relaxed, which allows sub-transactions to distribute their information immediately as they finish (therefore invalidation may occur after-the-fact and must be handled). Despite the additional logic required by SPCN, it outperforms traditional closed nesting by 1.78x at the lowest and 3.78x at the highest in the experiments run. Another method to alter transactional execution and boost performance is to relax the rules of visibility for parallel operations (known as their isolation). Depending on the application, correctness is not broken even if some transactions see external work that may later be undone due to a rollback, or if an object is written while another transaction is using an older instance of its data. With lock-based synchronization, developers would have to explicitly design their application with varying amounts of locks, and different lock organizations or hierarchies, to change the strictness of the execution. With transactional systems, the processing performed by the system itself can be set to utilize different rulings, which can change the performance of an application without requiring it to be largely redesigned. This notion leads to the second contribution in this thesis: AsR, or As-Serializable transactions. Serializability is the general form of isolation or strictness for transactions in many applications. In terms of execution, its definition is equivalent to only one transaction running at a time in a given system. Many transactional systems use their own internal form of locking to create Serializable executions, but it is typically too strict for many applications. AsR transactions allow the internal processing to be relaxed while additional meta-data is used external to the system, without requiring any interaction from the developer or any changes to the given application. AsR transactions offer multiple orders of magnitude more in throughput in highly-contentious scenarios, due to their capability to outlast traditional levels of isolation. / Master of Science

Protection of a Weaker Contract Party and Private International Law The topic of this dissertation thesis is the protection of weaker parties in the context of determination and application of the applicable law. The dissertation seeks anchor and concept of protection of weaker parties in the Rome I Regulation. The thesis is divided into three main parts. The first part deals with the basis for protection of weaker parties, linking the theoretical and value foundations on which the protection stands with practical implications that ignorance of significantly unequal position might have. For a comprehensive understanding, it is necessary to look at the background of individual legal rules. However, dealing with these issues cannot be viewed solely in the context of private international law. Certain legal institutions of private international law may not be designated solely for the protection of certain categories of weaker parties but may be used to protect a weaker party with regard to the concept of a weaker party and the importance of its protection in substantive law (especially civil law). The second part, which is the focal point of this thesis, consists in the analysis of ways of protecting the weaker parties, both at a more general methodological level and in the form of a more detailed...

This study concerns simultaneous bilingual acquisition (2L1) of Swedish-Brazilian children growing up in mixed-lingual families in Stockholm, with Swedish as their dominant language. Earlier studies on this language combination were not found. Not even were there any studies considering 2L1 children of the same age group as our main subjects (Anna 7;7,3–9;1,30, Maria 6;1,16–6;11,11). An analysis of their acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as a weaker language (WL) was carried out in a Generative Grammar approach, mainly through the selective theory of language acquisition. The corpus consists of interviews with 2L1 children in a semi-longitudinal registration of their production. The focus of this analysis lies on the observation of three domains of BP grammar that differ morpho-syntactically from Swedish: verb inflection; VP as minimal responses; NP number and gender agreement. Three main research questions were formulated: 1) Are the simple and robust structures, provided by domestic input enough for triggering the functional categories (FC) of their WL? 2) If the FCs are activated, do they develop in the same sequence as a WL as they would in BPL1? 3) If the 2L1 children show any deviations in acquiring the grammar of their WL, is it possible to distinguish any influence from Swedish? To answer these questions a contrastive study was carried out, comparing the acquisition of BPWL with studies on 2L1 and BPL1 acquisition. The results show that the domestic input is enough for triggering the grammar of the WL, and that it was triggered and developed through a similar procedure to that of BPL1, although delayed. Contact with BPL1 input in Brazil was necessary to activate the children’s oral production. When using VPs for minimal responses it requires more than domestic input, and the influence of Swedish was reflected in the subjects’ use of sim ‘yes’ instead of VPs, as in this case grammar enters the domain of discourse at the syntax/pragmatics interface.