SIEBZIG JAHRE RECHT DES WARENKAUFS VON ERNST RABEL ? WERK- UND WIRKGESCHICHTE

Resumo

Ernst Rabel’s book The Law of Sale of Goods, a study in comparative law, celebrated the 70th birthday in 2006, one year after the 50th anniversary of the death of the greatest German legal comparativist. This jubilee, in conjunction with the 80th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut, now the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, calls for a reflection on the reception of Rabel’s most famous work in German and its importance today. Rabel, who helped found the Institute and served as its first director, laid the groundwork for a worldwide law of sale of goods with his oeuvre. He himself had proposed the conception of such an international law of sale of goods in 1928 and published a Draft of a Uniform Law of Sale of Goods in 1935. His ideas did not come to fruition until 1964, when the Uniform Law on the Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (Hague Formation Convention) and the Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods (Hague Sales Convention) was passed. But the success of these conventions was limited; they attracted only very few ratifications. Their successor, however, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) of 1980, has achieved much greater significance: two thirds of international and foreign trade are governed by the CISG. Furthermore, Rabel, who is seen as the founder of modern legal comparison in Germany, also had an impact on the German Civil Code (BGB): when the BGB was modernised in 2002 (also to implement several EC directives), the CISG and Rabel’s suggestions were partly used as a model. For example, the rules on warranty (Gewährleistungsrecht) as well as impossibility were integrated into the general rules on breach of contract, as he had proposed.