Legal Definition of Lender

Lender is a person or entity who loans money to others. He from whom a thing is borrowed.2 min read

A person or entity who loans money to others. He from whom a thing is borrowed.

The contract of loan confers rights and imposes duties on the lender. The lender has the right to revoke the loan at his mere pleasure and is deemed the owner or proprietor of the thing during the period of the loan, so that an action for a trespass or conversion will lie in favor of the lender against a stranger who has obtained a wrongful possession or has made a wrongful conversion of the thing loaned; e.g., mere gratuitous permission to a third person to use a chattel does not, in contemplation of the common law, take it out of the possession of the owner. In this the Civil agrees with the common law.

In the civil law, the first obligation on the part of the lender is to suffer the borrower to use and enjoy the thing loaned during the time of the loan, according to the original intention. Such is not the doctrine of the common law. The lender is obliged by the civil law to reimburse the borrower the extraordinary expenses to which he has been put for the preservation of the thing lent. In such a case the borrower would have a lien on the thing and may detain it until these extraordinary expenses are paid and the lender cannot, even by an abandonment of the thing to the borrower, excuse himself from re-payment, nor is he excused by the subsequent loss of the thing by accident or by a restitution of it by the borrower, without insisting upon repayment. What would be decided at common law does not seem very clear.

Another case of implied obligation on the part of the lender by the civil law is that he is bound to give notice to the borrower of the defects of the thing loaned; and if he does not and conceals them and any injury occurs to the borrower thereby, the lender is responsible.