A great civilian misunderstanding: codes are not statutes, codes are restatements

Juan Javier del Granado, George Mason University Latin American and Caribbean Law and Economics Center

Abstract

Civilian legal scholars may benefit from codification projects undertaken in different legal traditions. The very ubiquity of codifications of private law across legal systems, from the Praetorian edicts of Republican Rome and the compilations of Justinian, to the American Law Institute's restatements in the United States of America, suggests that the usual civilian reasons thought to undergird codification may need to be reassessed. Moreover, our understanding of codification has important consequences for our understanding of the development of the notion of auctoritas in the Western legal tradition.