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This article examines the meaning and scope of liability in the construction industry in Panama through an examination of "ten-year liability," which consists of a legal obligation that falls on the various parties involved in contracts such the architect, the builder, and the developer who sells to the consumer.
This is an analysis of the various persons involved in the project, from the conception or design to its execution. These persons are not only charged with a general duty of care, because ten-year civil liability goes beyond this idea. In other words, it is a sine qua non requirement of professional civil liability to consider the professional a suitable person and, therefore, the person qualified to perform that function and guided by "technical standards" and "legal requirements" in engineering and architectural environments. Every professional working on a construction project must apply the rules of their art (lex artis) that govern their technical knowledge. Therefore, the legal nature of ten-year liability is as follows: it is a legal obligation. This specific study focuses on the function of the security right granted by the Panamanian Civil Code to the owner of the project or the person who buys in the real estate sector, and we examine other jurisdictions in this matter.
Similarly, our analysis considers Panamanian case law through a selection of rulings that exemplify how the ten-year liability operates in national jurisprudence as an instrument of real estate justice in order to conduct a practical examination of this special regimen.
