Spain has an extraordinarily rich legal history, one that reflects Roman, Gothic, Arabic, Papal, Holy Roman and French influences, and was the first nation to produce a published commercial code.

The present volume contains the texts of 18 lectures delivered in April, 1980, at a Workshop on the Effective Use of the Industrial Property System for the Benefit of Inventors, Industry and Commerce in the Asian and Pacific Region. It also contains the texts of the three opening speeches, the report of the workshop, including its conclusions and recommendations, and the list of participants.

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.