Tenant Structural Repair Obligation Validity

The dispute concerned a lease agreement where the tenant was obligated to perform certain repairs, and the lower court had deemed a clause making the tenant responsible for all major structural repairs, even those normally incumbent upon the landlord, to be abusive and therefore null, thus ordering the landlord to execute those repairs. The Supreme Court upheld this decision, reasoning that while parties are free to contractually modify the statutory distribution of repair obligations, a clause making the tenant exclusively responsible for structural repairs, which are inherently the landlord's responsibility under the law for maintaining the building's substance, constitutes an abuse of contractual freedom that unduly shifts an essential obligation, justifying the lower court's nullification of that specific clause.