Law and Commerce: The Evolution of Codified Business Law in Europe

Abstract

This paper tracks the evolution of the codification of commercial law and company law, also known as business law. Although the literature on codification in general is vast, little attention has been dedicated to the importance of business law in this context despite the first major moves towards codification being achieved in this field. A comparative and historical survey of the codification of business law in France, England and Germany illustrates how the European legal landscape has been affected by the process of casting the law in statutory form. Indeed, regardless of the commonly held misconception that there is ‘a’ commercial code, the legislative responses to the needs of commerce have varied widely from country to country, for while company law was always in focus, the rest of the corpus differs substantially. The code de commerce of 1807 was primarily of a procedural nature, while the German commercial code of 1861 created its own ‘private law cosmos’ and the late English codes adopted yet another, very selective, strategy. The aim of this comparative study is to understand the foundations of the legal institutions of the nineteenth century which still form the basis of our current statutes. This in turn allows some predictions for likely future developments to be made.