This book examines the Santillana Codes, legal instruments which form a distinct class of uniquely African civil code and are still in force today in a legal arc that extends from the Maghreb to the Sahel. Stigall presents the history of Santillana’s seminal legislative effort and provides a comparative analysis of the substance of those codes, illuminating commonalities between Islamic law and European legal systems.

Swiss citizens approve of their government and the way democracy is practiced; they trust the authorities and are satisfied with the range of services Swiss governments provide. This is quite unusual when compared to other countries. This open access book provides insight into the organization and the functioning of the Swiss state. It claims that, beyond politics, institutions and public administration, there are other factors which make a country successful. The authors argue that Switzerland is an interesting case, from a theoretical, scientific and a more practice-oriented perspective. While confronted with the same challenges as other countries, Switzerland offers different solutions, some of which work astonishingly well.

As the first legal history of Switzerland in English, this seminal work presents the legal development in the territory of today's Switzerland. Until 1798, the Swiss Confederation consisted of a conglomerate of around 50 local authorities with different constitutional statuses. The number of legislative jurisdictions was even greater; each territory, however small, had its own legal system before 1798. In the 19th century, legal unity was initially created within the framework of cantonal law and, since 1848, at the national level. Key developments of the 20th century were equality between men and women, social legislation and the influence of technological development. The focus of the book is on constitutional history, legal sources and legislation, court proceedings and jurisprudence. It also presents the political, economic and social backgrounds of legal developments

Richard A. Debs analyzes the classical Islamic law of property based on the Shari'ah, traces its historic development in Egypt, and describes its integration as a source of law within the modern format of a civil code. He focuses specifically on Egypt, a country in the Islamic world that drew upon its society's own vigorous legal system as it formed its modern laws. He also touches on issues that are common to all such societies that have adopted, either by choice or by necessity, Western legal systems. Egypt's unique synthesis of Western and traditional elements is the outcome of an effort to respond to national goals and requirements. Its traditional law, the Shari'ah, is the fundamental law of all Islamic societies, and Debs's analysis of Egypt's experience demonstrates how Islamic jurisprudence can be sophisticated, coherent, rational, and effective, developed over centuries to serve the needs of societies that flourished under the rule of law.

This detailed analysis of the content and configuration of civil codes in diverse jurisdictions also examines their relationship with some branches of private law as: family law, commercial law, consumer law and private international law. It analyzes the codification, decodification and recodification processes illuminating the dialogue between current codes – and private law legislation in general – with Constitutions and International Conventions. The commentary elucidates the changing requirements of civil law as it shifted from an early protection of patrimony to a support for commercial and contractual law. It also explains the varying trajectories of civil law, which in some jurisdictions was merged with religious legal tenets in its codification of familial relations, while in others it was fused with commercial law or, indeed, codified from scratch as a discrete legal corpus. Elsewhere, the volume provides material on differing approaches to consumer law, where relevant legislation may be scattered across numerous statutes, and also on private international law, a topic of increasing relevance in a world where business corporations have interests in multiple jurisdictions (and often play one off against another). The volume features invited contributions from leading scholars in the field of private law brought together for an in depth analysis of the current regulatory attitude in this field of the law in jurisdictions with diverse legal systems and traditions. In current times we are witnessing the adoption of diverging regulatory solutions. Through the analysis of the past and present of private law regulation, the volume unveils the underlying trends and relevance of the codification method across the world.

This work, which also contains the Introductory Act to the Code and the Marriage Law of the FRG, comes at a time when the growth of the Common Market and international trade have made access to the Code in English increasingly important.