Comparative Laws – 6881

Fall 2019

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the largest legal system in the world, namely the Civil Law System, which is used by most countries where Common Law doesn’t apply. We will study the basics of Contracts and Torts in the two leading countries, through the French Code Civil (CC) and the German one (BGB).

We will make a short introduction to civil procedure, in order to allow you to work on Court decisions in both systems and, by the same time, we will analyze, and discuss, as usual, some Court’s decisions (in English) to familiarize you with them. Lectures, in the book, will give you an overview of the subject of each class, and the courts’ decisions will allow us to understand how judges make decisions in the two systems, by comparison to Anglo-American Common Law.

The goals are to make you comfortable with the main aspects of contracts and torts laws as well as with Court decisions, their reasoning, how judges justify decisions on given articles of the code and not others.

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