For an obligation to minimize damage.

Summary The duty to mitigate requires the victim of an injury to take reasonable steps to limit or reduce the damage. It is firmly rooted in the common law systems, where it is known as the duty to mitigate damages. Some laws closer to French law have also recognized it. Affirmed by article 1479 of the new Quebec Civil Code, deduced from § 254 of the German B.G.B., it may be recognized as a duty to mitigate. G. B., it can be found in Belgian jurisprudence. In French positive law, on the other hand, the obligation to minimise damage exists, for the time being, only within the scope of the Vienna Convention of 11 April 1980 on the International Sale of Goods, which devotes Article 77 to it. Outside the scope of the latter, it has never been explicitly stated. On the basis of the classical mechanisms of the law of obligations, it would seem that French law has the means to accommodate it. Fairness and good faith militate in its favor in contractual matters. More generally, a breach of the obligation to minimise damage may appear to be a fault of the victim which, where appropriate, breaks the causal link between the initial harmful event and the final damage. This implicit recognition, which is possible on the basis of the most diverse notions, nevertheless raises a major problem: the determination of a unitary regime. As for its content, it is placed under the aegis of the reasonable. The victim does not have to do everything in his power to minimize the damage. He must only take reasonable measures to achieve this end. As for its sanctions, they are mainly of two kinds. Apart from the absence of compensation for the part of the damage that could have been avoided, the victim is sometimes, in a more radical way, deprived of a means of action.