Legal history helps us to understand our modern law. It explains why the law has become what it is. It lays open the premises on which the modern law is based. It constitutes a rich source of experience which is as valuable for the development of modern legal doctrines as for law reform. It may also reveal where a wrong turn has been taken and thus prevent us from repeating an error.
Today, however, historical legal scholarship has acquired an added significance in view of the Europeanization of private law and private law scholarship. It enables us to see the common ground between our...

As a result of the Nazi-regime, German law faculties lost just over a quarter of their members. Recent years have seen a growing body of literature on the contribution of scientists, historians, and literary and artistic figures who were forced to leave Germany and Austria after Hitler came to power. This volume is the first study of the important contribution of refugee and e migre legal scholars to the development of English law. It considers nineteen legal scholars originally trained in Germany or Austria, (fifteen of whom were expelled from their posts in the 1930s) and who made their...

Scotland and South Africa are two of the leading jurisdictions which integrate English common law with Continental civil law. This volume examines their experience and considers the sider lessons both for mixed legal systems and for the development of a European private law.

This book starts by surveying the use or neglect of good faith in European contract law and traces its historical origins. Its central part takes thirty hypothetical situations that have attracted the application of good faith and analyzes them according to fifteen national legal systems. It concludes by explaining how European lawyers, whether from a civil or common law background, need to come to terms with the principle of good faith.

This volume sets out initially to test the claim that, as combinations of Civil and Common Law influences, the mixed systems of contract law in Scotland and South Africa have anticipated the content of the Principles of European Contract Law (PECL) concluded and published in 2003 by the unofficial Commission on European Contract Law. The studies go much further, however. Current official moves towards a European contract law within the European Union lend the critiques of PECL offered in this volume an especial urgency and significance. A European contract law is nearer to reality than ever...

This book provides a history of some of the main institutions of South African private law and in so doing explores the process through which integration of the English common law and the continental civil law came about in that jurisdiction. Here is a book aimed at both European and South African audiences. For European lawyers it provides a stimulating insight into the way the process of harmonization of private law has occurred in South Africa and may occur within the European Union. By analysing the historical evolution of the most important institutions of the law of obligations and the...

The emergence of a European private law is a key legal issue today. Set-off and "extinctive" prescription are neglected topics in comparative literature. Reinhard Zimmermann maps out a model for a common European approach, providing practical examples of the arguments that may be employed in the process of harmonizing European private law. The essays originated during his work with the Commission on European Contract Law (the "Lando-Commission"), whose task is the "restatement" of European contract law. This volume is for comparative lawyers and legal historians.

On 1 January 2000 the German Civil Code (BGB) became one hundred years old. It had been remarkably resilient throughout a century marked by catastrophic upheavals and a succession of fundamentally different political regimes. Two years later, however, the most sweeping individual reform ever to have affected the Code entered into force. This was the Modernization of the Law of Obligations Act: triggered by the necessity to implement the European Consumer Sales Directive, but going far beyond what was required by the European Community.
The most important practical implication of the...

This book starts by surveying the use or neglect of good faith in European contract law and traces its historical origins. Its central part takes thirty hypothetical situations that have attracted the application of good faith and analyzes them according to fifteen national legal systems. It concludes by explaining how European lawyers, whether from a civil or common law background, need to come to terms with the principle of good faith.

Christian Thomasius was the founding father of the German enlightenment, and as such initiated a second German "reformation." He was a philosopher, educator and journalist, but above all he was a lawyer. He was extraordinarily successful as an academic teacher and was also a prolific writer. Perhaps best known today for his campaign against witch-hunting, he was, in his day, equally renowned for his study of Roman law, of which the Larva Legis is a single but remarkable example.

The text reprinted and translated in this book is notable for three reasons. First because of the...