摘要：Brazilian legal scholarship usually refers to the debtor’s (offender) legal prerogative to compel the creditor (victim) to mitigate his or her own damages as “dever de mitigar os prejuízos”. This expression consists in a literal translation of the Anglo-American duty to mitigate damages. Therefore it stumbles on most challenges presented by legal translation. As a consequence, it is subject to several grave conceptual distortions. In the light of this problem, this article promotes a brief – but not perfunctory – scrutiny of the meaning attached to legal notions of “ônus”, “dever”, “obrigação” and “incumbência” (which legal scholars employ to address the aforementioned topic), in order to better outskirt particularities of the mitigation doctrine under Brazilian Law. At the end, it concludes that the debtor’s legal prerogative to compel the creditor to mitigate his or her own damages presents itself in the light of Brazilian Private Law as an incumbency (“incumbência”) derived from good faith.
关键词：Civil liability; mitigation of damages; incumbency; law of obligations; good faith.
