OBLIGATIONS CREATED BY WRITING

This category refers to an old form of constitution of obligation by means of an entry in a household account book acknowledging a debt. The obli­gation thus created was dependent on the account entry, not on any valid underlying agreement.

While this form of contract seems to be included by Justinian in the In­stitutes, on closer examination it appears that he is talking about something else, namely the difficulties of disproving the validity of an obligation that has been constituted in writing. Time limits applied to any such attempt, beyond which the obligation’s validity could not be disputed. However, the assumption is that there is some other form of contract underlying the written acknowledgement.