Abstract

Art. 750 of the Civil Code provides the cornerstone of the current regulation of service contracts in the Polish private law. Under this provision, all service contracts that „have not been regulated otherwise” are subject to the provisions on mandate contracts (umowa zlecenia) which apply to them mutatis mutandis. The key premise of this regulation – the concept of „unregulated” service contracts is, however, extremely vague, giving rise to profound discrepancies in the doctrine and the judicature. The text discusses various ways of understanding the actual meaning of this prerequisite that appeared so far in the doctrine and case-law. First of all, it tries to generalize different views on the degree of „intensity” of the regulation of contract which constitutes a threshold for the application of Art. 750 and subsequently the provisions on mandates. Secondly, it discusses a frequent interpretation of this provision, wich identifies „unregulated” contracts with the general concept of innominate contracts. Due, however, to profound controversies that the innominate/nominate contracts division entails, the author argues that this category may be inoperative on the grounds of Art. 750 and counterproductive to its clarity. Therefore, the author argues in favour of autonomous understanding of the concept of „unregulated” contracts that has to be induced step-by-step on the basis of the case-law, qualifying ad casum the actually concluded contracts.