well as the Principles of European Contract Law (1995), 926926. See Principles of European Contract Law (Ole Lando & Hugh Beale, eds.2000). the latter hoping to advance the Lando Commission’s impossible dream of a hard-core European Code. 927927. See id. at xxiii (one objective of the Principles is to serve as basis for future European Code of Contracts). For a critique of the European Civil Code project, as unveiled at the Hague in 1997, see Joseph Lookofsky, ‘The Harmonization of Private and Commercial Law,’ 39 Scandinavian Studies in Law 111 (2000), available at http://www.scandinavianlaw.se/pdf/39-7.pdf.
In other comparative contexts, however, the ‘postmodern’ tendency has been to debunk (or at least tone down) such ‘universals’ – this reflecting the view that differences between legal systems and constructs often trump the similarities. 928928. Accord: Curran, supra n. 2, at 29. This is not to say that there are no (near) equivalents, nor that unification is doomed to remain illusory, but rather that even within the most successful supra-national codifications, subtle differences in the language and content of underlying domestic conceptions deserve our continuing attention.
During my tenure as an academic at the University of Copenhagen (1981-2015), I focused – not on comparative studies as such – but rather on Danish domestic Obligations, Contracts and Sales. Still, having studied two legal systems from top to toe, 929929. Leading to a J.D. at NYU (1971), followed by cand.jur. (1981) and dr.jur. (1989) degrees in Copenhagen. each in its original language, I often saw one system’s rule or construct in light of the other system’s pendant. I also often compared domestic sales law with the 1980 Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), 930930. See http://www.uncitral.org/uncitral/en/uncitral_texts/sale_goods/1980CISG.html. the rule set that became an integral part of American law (in 1988) and Danish law (in 1990). 931931. I.e. the part of American and Danish law that applies to international sales. See Joseph Lookofsky, Understanding the CISG (5th Worldwide ed. 2017) § 1.1.
In some of these contexts, I found that even hard-to-translate rules and constructs ultimately lead to similar substantive solutions. In other instances, where a given rule or construct in one system might at first appear to ‘translate’ readily into something similar in the other, the results upon closer analysis proved very different.