The emergence of a social private law in Europe: a trialogue

Volume 327-2 of the Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte now published

The end of the First World War also meant the end of the era of liberal civil law codification framed by the French Code civil (1804) and the German BGB (1900). The BGB was criticised right from the start as »lacking a drop of socialist oil«, and the need for reforms was even more present in France and in Italy (Codice civile, 1865). Although Germany, France and Italy played major roles in the genesis of a continental European social private law, the discourse between legal scholars from these three countries has only now been submitted to an in-depth analysis as part of trilateral conferences at the Villa Vigoni.

The second of the three resulting volumes deals with the relevance of the legal »axis Berlin–Rome« («Asse Roma–Berlino») in this context. This axis, established in 1936, has not yet been the subject of in-depth research: German and Italian jurists collaborated with the goal of doing away with liberal civil law. In Italy, these efforts led to the Codice civile of 1942, which is still in force today. In Germany, on the other hand, the work on a »Volksgesetzbuch«, a »code for the people«, stagnated because those in power lost interest. Nevertheless, there had been numerous bilateral conferences and meetings between Italian and German jurists, which invigorated the reform efforts in both countries. The present trilingual volume asks a provocative question: the undoubtedly major differences between Fascismo and National Socialism notwithstanding, how do the Italian and the German project actually differ?