Note 187 — Chapter II · NEGLIGENT INTERFERENCE (continued 8)
Reading edition
Planiol, Traité élémentaire de droit civil (6 ed.) II, § 899: “It frequently happens that one who suffers damage through the fault of another is not himself exempt from all fault; he has concurred in the accident and shares responsibility therefor with the other. In this case there is what we call in practice faute commune. This community of fault diminishes the responsibility of the principal author of damage who now only owes a partial reparation.”
German Civil Code, § 254: “If any fault of the injured party has contributed in causing the injury, the obligation to compensate the injured party and the extent of the compensation to be made depends upon the circumstances, especially upon how far the injury has been caused chiefly by the one or the other party.
“This applies also even if the fault of the injured party consisted only in an omission to call the attention of the debtor to the danger of an unusually serious injury which the debtor neither knew nor ought to have known, or in an omission to avert or mitigate the injury....”
[The word “debtor” is used here in the Roman sense, meaning the person bound in any sort of obligation—here the delictual obligation to make reparation for an injury due to fault.]