Section 820: Principal's liability to third parties
Statutory text (Thai original)
ตัวการย่อมมีความผูกพันต่อบุคคลภายนอกในกิจการทั้งหลายอันตัวแทนหรือตัวแทนช่วงได้ทำไปภายในขอบอำนาจแห่งฐานตัวแทน
Verbatim from the Royal Gazette / Office of the Council of State
English translation
The principal is bound to third persons by the acts which the agent or the subagent has done within the scope of his authority by virtue of his agency.
This English translation is provided for reference only and has not yet been firm-verified. Always rely on the Thai original.
Firm annotation
Section 820 is the doctrine of apparent authority in Thai law. The principal cannot escape liability by saying the agent exceeded actual authority if the principal's conduct led the third party to reasonably believe the authority existed. Common application: a company managing director introduces an external advisor as having authority to negotiate; when the deal goes wrong, the company is bound even if internal corporate documents never granted that authority.
Cited in 61 Supreme Court decisions (1947 to 2024)
Selected citing decisions
- Decision 3118/2567 (2024)
- Decision 2810/2565 (2022)
- Decision 460/2565 (2022)
- Decision 3513-3526/2565 (2022)
- Decision 4163/2564 (2021)
- Decision 1435/2563 (2020)
- Decision 7344/2559 (2016)
- Decision 9365/2558 (2015)
This list is selected automatically, weighted towards judgments that turn on this section rather than ones that merely recite it when passing sentence. It has not yet been reviewed by the firm.
Most often cited alongside
Sections that appear in the same judgments as this one most often. The figure is the number of decisions.
Counted across the firm's corpus of 83,652 Supreme Court decisions, 1921 to 2026. The count is complete; the stated year range trims rare outliers so it describes where the citations actually sit. These figures are computed by us and are not official court statistics. How we count these, and what we measured
Related guides on ThaiLawOnline
Cite this section
-
Plain citation
Civil and Commercial Code, s. 820 (Thailand) -
Academic citation
Civil and Commercial Code (Thailand), s. 820. ThaiLawOnline, https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-820/ (accessed 8 August 2026). -
Thai citation
ป.พ.พ. มาตรา 820 -
Permalink
https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-820/ -
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<blockquote cite="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-820/"><p>The principal is bound to third persons by the acts which the agent or the subagent has done within the scope of his authority by virtue of his agency.</p><footer>Civil and Commercial Code, s. 820 (Thailand) — <a href="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-820/">ThaiLawOnline</a></footer></blockquote>
The Thai text is authoritative. The English is an unofficial translation by ThaiLawOnline, free to reuse with attribution.