First entry

The construction of Europe represents a great challenge for European lawyers. It appears that difficulties arise not only due to terminology’s misunderstanding. The fact is that national legal systems evolved in different ways for many reasons, such as cultural, ideological, historical reasons…

The fact that the legal systems may give different solutions using different notions and that there are rules of contract on different levels (international, European, national) makes the subject matter of European law a very difficult but interesting one. That’s why the understanding of each level of rules is very important in order to be able to understand the European contract Law as a whole.

For instance, we can see that the German notion of “Willenserklärung” which is quite an equivalent from the French “declaration de volonté” doesn’t exist in the English legal system: English judges have no interest in an hypothetic declaration of intent because their system is not built in a subjective way such as the French and german ones. On the other side the European principles of contract Law show that many concepts are mostly available.

Lot of questions are controversial: when does the offer and the acceptance happens? Would that be better to create a unique contract Law for all the European contracts?...

Despite these difficulties and in order to increase commercial relations between the European countries, international contracts have to be done in the easiest and safest way. Today, parties to the contract have many choices in the Law that is applied to their contract. Some authors speak about “forum shopping” to describe the phenomenon in which the parties choose the Law that will be the best for them.

: 14 Oct 2010 00:47 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem