Last year saw the 200th anniversary of one of the most influential national codes,1the FrenchCode civilof 1804. The celebration of this Napoleonic achievement has led in turn to renewed discussions on the understanding, purpose and contemporary form of codification.2At the same time 2004 saw Belgium adopt its very first Code of private international law.3Codification is so closely associated with continental Europe4that it may be startling to read that civilian legal systems are not entirely codified. In fact despite the arguable closeness of domestic substantive rules and conflict of law rules, this area of law largely escaped the codification process of the 19th century. What is more remarkable is the fact that the newCode de droit international privéappears to be a codification in the classical form. It represents not simply a compendium of existing statutes but a detailed reform of the entire area.5It is certainly true that in contemporary Europe the elaboration of classical codes, once viewed as the expression of affirmed political power,6has become a rather exceptional occurrence. This is not to say that codification is no longer a fundamental constant of the civilian tradition. Civil law systems are still essentially founded on the precedence of enacted and in principle codified7general rules on the basis of which solutions are to be deduced. However, codification is polymorphic,8and codes, which ideally display a number of attributes— coherence, logical structure, absence of contradiction, conformity of codified and applied law, completeness, clarity, ease of use and publicity9—may seek to achieve the general purpose of the formal simplification or systematization of the law in different ways. Indeed in Europe the aspiration of creating ‘perfect laws’10that prevailed throughout the golden age of classical codification in the 19th century, has largely given way to less demanding forms of codification.11Recent years have concurrently seen movements of decodification12as well as recodification,13and witnessed the creation of generally less ambitious codification-compilations14which gather and order existing rules in specific areas without engaging in reform.15This final development ought not to be regarded as surprising as the combination of reform and codification is far from simple:experience shows that it is very difficult truly to do both at the same time […] The reform shall precede the codification process so that the latter may integrate the former, or the codification shall precede the reform in order to facilitate its realisation: it is more opportune and more intelligible to reform in view of the legal state clearly revealed by codification.16