Short answer. Yes, but only a reasonable price. Article 1489 provides that where necessaries are sold and delivered to a minor or other person without capacity to act, he must pay a reasonable price for them, notwithstanding that his contracts are otherwise voidable for want of capacity.
What the law says
Where necessaries are those sold and delivered to a minor or other person without capacity to act, he must pay a reasonable price therefor.
Civil Code, Article 1489 — Who May Buy and Sell; Necessaries. Read the full provision →
The general rule this is an exception to
Capacity is the starting point. Article 1327 lists unemancipated minors among those who cannot give consent to a contract, and Article 1390 makes a contract voidable where one party is incapable of giving consent, binding until annulled in a proper action but vulnerable to attack. Left there, a shopkeeper who sold to a child would be exposed to having the whole transaction undone. Article 1489 carves out the case where what was sold was a necessary, and the reasoning is plain enough: the alternative is that people who most need to be supplied become the people nobody is willing to supply.
Sold and delivered, and only then
The obligation attaches to Where necessaries are those sold and delivered to a minor or other person without capacity to act, he must pay a reasonable price therefor. Delivery is doing work in that sentence. The liability is for necessaries actually supplied and received, not for an executory promise, so a minor who agreed to buy but took nothing is not caught by it. Nor does the rule turn the minor into a person of full capacity for that transaction; it imposes a specific obligation to pay for what he got, and leaves his incapacity otherwise intact.
A reasonable price is not the contract price
This is the part most often misread. The article does not enforce the bargain; it fixes what must be paid at a reasonable price, which is a question of fact about the going rate for the goods at the time and place they were supplied. A seller who charged a vulnerable buyer three times the usual figure recovers the usual figure. The same logic runs through Article 1399, under which a person whose contract is defective for incapacity restores only insofar as he has actually been benefited by the thing or price he received.
The fight is usually over what counts as necessary
Food, medicine, clothing, shelter and the means of transport and schooling that go with them are the core, and the standard is measured against the person's own circumstances and station rather than a fixed list. What is a necessary for one buyer is a luxury for another. So the useful evidence is what was supplied and why: the prescription or medical record, the enrolment document, the itemised invoice showing goods rather than a lump sum. A seller relying on this article should be able to show both the necessity and that the price charged was ordinary.
Related provisions
- Civil Code, Article 1489 — Who May Buy and Sell; Necessaries
- Civil Code, Article 1327 — Who Cannot Give Consent
- Civil Code, Article 1390 — Voidable Contracts
- Civil Code, Article 1399 — Restitution by an Incapacitated Party