Europe and the legal reform of the law of obligations

Abstract

2002 has been an incisive year for German lawyers and for the time-honoured German Civil Code, the "Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch" (BGB) of 1900. The law of obligations, this very core of the BGB and of civil law at all, underwent deep-rooted changes and every practising lawyer in Germany, every law student and, even worse, every law professor had and still has to learn this part of the law almost entirely anew. It is tempting to present therefore a survey of all those changes as comprehensively as possible in a short paper like this and leave it to the reader to conclude how the German reform fi ts into the European development. I will, however, follow another path, namely fi rst give some general information on the two reforms as it in fact were and on their background, then only indicate the main changes and put them in relation to their counterparts in other European countries, thirdly discuss the relationship between national and European developments in private law and fi nally draw some conclusions. The whole exercise serves the aim to state, if at all possible, how and into which direction private law legislation in Europe should proceed today