Realism and idealism in the harmonization of contract law in the European Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advantages of enhanced cross-border trade among the member states are emphasized by advocates of the harmonization of law in the European Union, a principle which has been included in each of the treaties of accession. Following political events in 1989, the concept of a Europe-wide law of obligations received renewed impetus. The leading advocates, who comprised a Study Group under the chairmanship of Professor Christian von Bar, were academic lawyers supported by the European Commission and by journals devoted to legal integration. The impact of decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2000 and 2006, however, ensured that only a modest proposal, as distinct from a European Civil Code, would be put forward. \nThe Common European Sales Law, an optional instrument, is assessed both in terms of how it is expected to work and in the light of benefits arising from the existence of standard European terms. Also in this thesis historical-legal arguments in favour of ‘Europeanized’ contract law are evaluated and found to be not wholly convincing. The counter-argument, put forward by the Canadian Professor Pierre Legrand, maintains that the principal European legal traditions are epistemologically distinct, rendering convergence impossible. Legrand’s contribution to the debate is possibly overstated but has never been shown to be misconceived. However, this thesis draws attention to the degree of affinity – greater than is generally recognized – which always existed between the Common and Civil Law traditions. It is argued that this underlying affinity is more likely to lead to durable results by European lawyers seeking solutions to shared problems than by the artificial process of codification.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".