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Jansen, Nils --- "European Civil Code" [2006] ELECD 175; in Smits, M. Jan (ed), "Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law

Editor(s): Smits, M. Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420130

Section: Chapter 24

Section Title: European Civil Code

Author(s): Jansen, Nils

Number of pages: 12

Extract:

24 European Civil Code*
Nils Jansen


The project of a European Civil Code forms part of the larger process to har-
monize European private law (cf. Smits, 2000; Kramer, 2001). It combines
two elements that for a long time seemed to have lost any political signifi-
cance. The first is the idea of unifying private law, which during the 20th
century had been of mere academic interest. The common structures and
principles of European private law as well as differences with regard to single
rules were the subject of comparative research, not political argument. Of
course, there are now a number of European directives also on matters of
private law. However, these directives typically concern only limited areas
of the law; they aim less at unification than at progressive, substantive
change. They strengthen the position of consumers and they enhance
competition within the common market; they do not primarily aim to estab-
lish unifying structures of legal thinking. The second element is the
Enlightenment's idea of a codification, a specific historical phenomenon
that originated in late 17th- and 18th-century legal science and was often
regarded as outdated in the second half of the 20th century. Of course the
Dutch Nieuw Burgerlijk Wetboek was finally introduced as recently as 1992
and the Code Civil of Quebec in 1994. But for many lawyers `decodification',
not codification, characterized modern private law: the dissolution of codi-
fied law into special statutes, large layers of judge-made law and special rules
for different ...