The Wave of Transfers: An East-European Chapter in the Civil Law Tradition

Abstract

To the civil law tradition belong the countries in which Roman law was received or a romanistic civil

codification was imitated. The latter is true for Eastern Europe, inundated at the beginning of the 19th

century by a wave of legal transfers from the West. In the countries of East-Central Europe, Poland,

Bohemia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia, both codes of natural law, code civil and ABGB, were

introduced, whereas Romania and Serbia adopted their faithful translations.

In the second half of the 19th century, this transfer was followed by the doctrinal reception of the German

pandect science, sometimes called „pandectification“, experienced for the first time by the Austrian and

Prussian civil law scholarship. In Eastern Europe, it was Greece, Hungary and Russian Empire which

preserved their traditional law collections, limiting themselves to their modernization with the help of

conceptual categories borrowed from the German pandect science.

This legislative and doctrinal-judicial transfer was additionally flanked with western continental models of

legal education and administration of justice. Even Poland and Hungary, countries which represented in

East-Central Europe traditional bulwarks of lay justice, quickly formed a professional court staff. The

reception of these models of legal education and administration of justice proved essential for the legal

„civilization“ of Eastern Europe during the long 19th century.