Review of Leone Niglia, 'The Struggle for European Private Law: A Critique of Codification'

Abstract

Controversies around the European Commission’s attempt to codify European Union private law now usher the codification saga into the twenty-first century. Much EU scholarship has focused on the adoption of the Draft Common Frame of Reference or its shortened version, the Optional Sales Law Code. In "The Struggle for European Private Law", Leone Niglia launches a searching critique that revisits the very notion of codification’s distinctly legislative paradigm. That model is, on his view, fundamentally flawed. The true function of a code goes missing. In order to grasp the full effects of codification, and to comprehend the purpose and function of some final text, we must, Niglia argues, shift our attention away from that legislative paradigm, towards what he identifies as a jurisprudential model. Codification becomes comprehensible, he suggests, only through an analysis – neglected in the existing literature – of jurisprudential actors within the process, such as judges and scholars.

Keywords: codification, commercial law, critical legal studies, EU law, private law