Article by Mauro Bussani
In continental Europe the contribution of legal scholars to the drafting of civil codes is a consolidated way of asserting the status of the former and avoiding long-lasting standoffs for the latter. Preparation and implementation of any code needs scholars working as technical simulators to anticipate possible problems and solutions, but this is also what provides scholarship with social prestige and indispensability. Hence, it comes as no surprise that in the scholarly arenas the process of codifying (under many disguises) European private law proceeds at full swing. It proceeds at a sectorial level in many areas. It proceeds at an all-inclusive level in the plans of the Study Group on a European Civil Code, directed by Professor von Bar. The latter group is also active in the drafting of the so-called Common Frame of Reference (CFR), which, notwithstanding the formal limits assigned to its role and contents by the European Commission, has actually been elaborated by the network of scholars gathered around the above mentioned group as a proper draft of a European civil code. This codification process proceeds despite the hesitations of the EU institutions. It proceeds despite lots of reservations and caveats that many parties have expressed in regard to this undertaking.
This Article does not again address these cautions and perplexities. It instead focuses on an issue largely overlooked by the participants in the codification debate. The issue concerns the geopolitical scope of the would-be European code, i.e., the role that we, the Europeans, want this code to play in the worldwide legal arena.
In other words, is this would-be European code meant to be, or not to be, considered from its very conception as a possible leading pattern in the ongoing worldwide competition among legal models? This is a kind of problem that most nineteenth- and twentieth-century national codes could, and actually did, overlook. Yet it seems to me that the current situation in political and economic affairs around the globe urges the European codification debate to pay more attention to this issue than it has received so far.
About the Author
Mauro Bussani. Full Professor of Comparative Law, University of Trieste (Italy).
Citation
83 Tul. L. Rev. 1083 (2009)