English Commercial Law: The Codification Of The English Legal System

I- INTRODUCTION

Over the years, different jurisdictions had built their specific system of rules of conduct to govern behaviour. These legal systems, influenced by historical and cultural roots, can be distinguished in two families, the Civil law and the Common law legal systems. The distinctions lies in the process in which each decision is make by the judge and on the legal sources that shapes the law. Indeed, by contrast to the Common law system, which is largely based on Precedents, meaning the decisions that have already been made by judges in similar cases, the Civil law system is based on legislator’s decisions and legal codes with which judges have to justify their judgment . Consequently, instead of referencing to concepts and rules

While there are lots of authors who are argued in favour of this codification since two centuries, practitioners and business in the English community had always been afraid about this idea. To understand the context of this debate, I will, first, briefly explain what do we generally mean by the term ‘codification’. Then, I’ll take few points about the origins of English commercial law and describe its modern definition. Finally, I will outline the main arguments why I am against the proposition of a commercial

The Lex mercatoria was an international law of commerce governing the trades and disputes based on the customs and practices of merchants. By the nineteen century, the law of merchant was fully incorporated in the Common law, but the development of commercial law led to a conflicting mass of case law . Following the commercial community recommendations, European countries started to rationalized the commercial law by building codes . English law didn’t follow this path, but instead adopted a series of Act of Parliament focusing on specific area, such as Bills of Exchange Act 1882 and the Sale of Good Act 1893 . Finally, the rise of the consumerism forced the Parliament to recognize the separateness of certain commercial transaction and to adopted an interventionist approach that aimed to create a body of laws protecting consumers, such as the Unfair Contract Terms ACT 1977 and Consumer Protection Act 1987