Hard Code Now!
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Ugo Mattei
This paper advocates the immediate beginning of a genuine, pluralistic political process leading to a binding codification of European Private Law. It is a critique of what I characterize as the post-modernist "soft" discourse of current European private law. This soft ideology stays behind proposals of "restatement" of European law; notions of "model" European codes; assertions of the sufficiency of European legal science as an alternative to codification; theories of competition between national legal systems as an efficient pattern of private law integration; notions of facilitating, optional "default law" as an efficient alternative to mandatory binding legal rules. My claim is that such soft rhetoric is yet another pattern of reception of American legal categories, poorly fitting the present fabric of the European legal scenario, and yielding to a variety of political consequences that should be spelled out rather than kept tacit.The new European Code should be hard, minimal, not limited to contracts, and process-oriented. It should aim to reflect the social fabric of European capitalism. The European codification process should look beyond the frontiers of fortress Europe and locate itself in the global dynamic of lawmaking.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontiers Article
- Hard Code Now!
- The Common Core of European Private Law in Boxes and Bundles
- The Politics of European Contract Law: Who has an Interest in What Kind of Contract Law for Europe?
- Judicial Cooperation in the European Courts: Testing Three Models of Judicial Behavior
- Advances Article
- North America as a Medieval Legal Construction
- Human Rights Risk, Infrastructure Projects and Developing Countries
- Intellectual Property Rights and Legal Order
- Constitutional Courts in New Democracies: Understanding Variation in East Asia
- Topics Article
- Foreign Inspired Courts as Agencies of Peace in Troubled Societies. A Plea for Realism and for Creativity.
- Legislative incursions into modern trusts doctrine in England: The Trustee Act 2000 and the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999
- The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal in Italian Criminal Justice
- Conflict of Interests and the Fair Dealing Duty
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontiers Article
- Hard Code Now!
- The Common Core of European Private Law in Boxes and Bundles
- The Politics of European Contract Law: Who has an Interest in What Kind of Contract Law for Europe?
- Judicial Cooperation in the European Courts: Testing Three Models of Judicial Behavior
- Advances Article
- North America as a Medieval Legal Construction
- Human Rights Risk, Infrastructure Projects and Developing Countries
- Intellectual Property Rights and Legal Order
- Constitutional Courts in New Democracies: Understanding Variation in East Asia
- Topics Article
- Foreign Inspired Courts as Agencies of Peace in Troubled Societies. A Plea for Realism and for Creativity.
- Legislative incursions into modern trusts doctrine in England: The Trustee Act 2000 and the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999
- The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal in Italian Criminal Justice
- Conflict of Interests and the Fair Dealing Duty
