CYIL 2012

PARALLEL NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LAWS ȃ CZECH LAW AND THE PROPOSED… study on a harmonizing multi-jurisdictional law 7 (for purposes of assessing CESL) and illustrates the importance of constantly revising commercial laws to keep them relevant to new types of transactions. Part 2 then surveys existing Czech commercial and consumer law. It examines the CISG as part of the domestic law of the Czech Republic. Part 3 provides a brief introduction to the proposed CESL. It examines the coverage or scope of CESL, its characteristics, structure, and some of its key provisions. Part 4 briefly compares CESL to the CISG. Finally, Part 5 suggests some possible uses of CESL and the CISG in revising Czech law. 2. Current State of Czech Law and the American Uniform Commercial Code The Czech legal system is a civil law system aligned with the Germanic civil law tradition. As such, the Civil Code and other independent codes, like the Commercial Code, are seen as the core source of law. Unlike the common law, legal doctrine is not considered a primary source of law in the Czech legal system. “But, from 1989 onwards, there is an undeniable and continuous rise of the importance of case law in the Czech legal system”. 8 The old Civil Code was adopted in 1964 under the tutelage of a non-democratic, socialist legal system that eschewed the concept of private property. It lacked a fully developed commercial law. Unfortunately, instead of replacing the 1964 Code, the Code has been heavily amended, but remained out of date. More importantly for this undertaking, despite the enactment of a separate Commercial Code, Czech law in the area of sales of goods and licensing, and in “the whole field of private law, including those areas omitted by the existing Civil Code but which logically relate to it in particular family law and commercial law, is in rather urgent need of new codification, which has been discussed in the Czech Republic since the early nineties.” 9 Fortunately, subsequent to the writing of this Article, the Czech Parliament adopted a new Civil Code (Act No. 89/2012 Sb.) and International Private Law Act (Act N. 91/2012 Sb.). These new laws enter into force on 1 January 2014. The Czech Civil Code provides the basic general rules of contracts, 10 along with some specialized bodies of rules, such as for insurance contracts. In contrast, most commercial codes provide rules for numerous sub categories of commercial law. The analysis presented here remains relevant, despite the recent enactments, because it reviews the CESL and its potential use in future enactments or revisions of Czech law. 7 The UCC is a multi-jurisdictional law because each of America’s fifty states has their own commercial and private laws administered by self-contained court systems. The UCC is America’s greatest success story in harmonizing state law because it has been adopted by all fifty states. 8 David Elischer, Ondřej Frinta &, Monika Pauknerová, “Private Law”, The Lawyer Quarterly 2 (2012), 69 (hereinafter, Elischer, Frinta & Pauknerová, Private Law ). 9 Ibid. 10 For the idea that general contract law provides rules for all voluntary transactions, see Nathan Oman, “A Pragmatic Defense of Contract law”, Georgetown Law Review 98 (2009), 77.

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