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Dacoronia, Eugenia --- "Greece" [2006] ELECD 178; 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 27

Section Title: Greece

Author(s): Dacoronia, Eugenia

Number of pages: 5

Extract:

27 Greece
Eugenia Dacoronia


1 Introduction
Greece (Ella/da), officially called Hellas, belongs to the Romanic families
of law. Its legal system is located somewhere in between the French and the
German Legal Family, although it seems to approach the German one
much more. The influence of French legislation and doctrine may be traced
back to the first revolutionary assemblies (Epidaurus, 1822, Astros, 1823,
Trizena, 1827), which adopted liberal and democratic constitutions mod-
elled on the French Declaration of Human Rights. Nowadays, the influence
of French models is confined to commercial and administrative law. As far
as the civil law is concerned, it was influenced by the work of the German
Pandectists while the redaction of the German Civil Code (BGB) was used
as a pattern for the Greek Civil Code (GCC). Regarding criminal law, the
Penal Law of 1833 and the Criminal Procedure Act of 1834 ­ both drafted
by the Bavarian lawyer G.L. Maurer and based on Bavarian models ­ after
being applied for more than a century and amended several times, were
replaced by the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1950
which entered into force on 1 January 1951. In Greece there is uniformity
of law. The only official national language is Greek: Greek is the language
used in all statutes and in all court proceedings as well.

2 Constitutional law
The constitution of Greece (Eu/ntagma thß Ella/daß) is written. It was
adopted by a specially empowered Parliament in 1975, less than ...