The Contract Law Codification Process in Europe : Policies, Targets and Time Dimensions

The contribution aims to address the issues implied by the following questions: (a) What is the contract law to be codified? (b) What is the possible impact of a European contract law codification upon the other private law fields? (c) Which are the driving forces behind and ahead of the European codification process? The paper approaches these problems by focusing on the fragmentation in different layers of European contract law within and across national frontiers, and on the bearing that this ‘stratification’ may have on the choice of adopting a code with either a ‘regional’ or a world-wide scope. Moreover, the paper tackles some issues implied by – and not always made explicit within – the discussions about the European codification, such as: the alleged parallelism between economic and legal integration, the role of scholarship within the European legal stage, the ‘pride and prejudice’ aspects of the ‘legal uniformity v. legal diversity’ debate