Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Dedek, Helge; Schermaier, Martin J. --- "German law" [2012] ELECD 992; in Smits, M. Jan (ed), "Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, Second Edition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012) 349

Book Title: Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, Second Edition

Editor(s): Smits, M. Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804158

Section: Chapter 30

Section Title: German law

Author(s): Dedek, Helge; Schermaier, Martin J.

Number of pages: 22

Abstract/Description:

German emigré author Sebastian Haffner relates a conversation with Wickham Steed that took place in 1941. Steed, by then the doyen of English political journalism, had previously been The Times’s Germany correspondent for many years. How was it possible, the two men wondered, that Germany had descended so quickly and without any considerable resistance into a state of base collective criminality? To Haffner’s surprise, the elderly gentleman pointed to the German Civil Code, the famous ‘Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch’ (BGB). Haffner, who was a lawyer by training and had passed the two German ‘State Examinations’ before his flight to England, had learned to respectfully approach the Civil Code as the consummation of legal thought – its very cathedral. Yet Steed insisted: to him, the BGB was the most eloquent expression of the blasphemous attempt to confine justice to a golden cage of perfectly crafted mechanical rules. Over time, these rules – positive law, as such – began to be mistaken for justice, and any real sense of equity and justice had been suffocated.