Third Party Rights and Contractual Groupings vs Privity of Contract in Commercial Contract Law

‘Roman law generally refused to acknowledge the validity of agreements in terms of which third parties were intended to acquire rights. It is safe to assume that in early Roman law “privity of contract”, in this sense, was so much a matter of course that it hardly needed to be emphasized: legal acts and their effects were seen as a unity. Legal effects were not abstracted from the persons performing the formalities and could therefore not be made to originate in the person of an independent outsider.’