Autonomy of Common European Sales Law in Lithuania
Sį dokumentą lietuvių kalba galima rasti adresu: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2243074 Private law is the area of law in which the resistance to unification in Europe is probably the strongest. Private law codification initiative, which began in 1989, after more than twenty years was recently reduced to optional non binding common sales law draft, which is gradually making its way through the EU institutions’ legislative process. Choice of EU regulation as a form indicates that the willingness to reach objective results is strong enough, but the reasoning in support of this project faces equally strong argument against it. Lithuanian experience expands this discussion in several important respects. Rome I Regulation Article 6.2. deadlock solution is specifically beneficial for smaller countries, where market participants have less bargaining power. In addition, an optional supplementary regulatory framework that the parties could choose, would allow testing existing legal systems by competition. Lithuania's recent reform experience suggests that the draft regulation provides for a smooth change in Europe. Multilingualism, some of the Common European Sales Law solutions, radically different from the Lithuanian national legal provisions will certainly require revision of the existing concepts, but that is not a reason not to try to improve the EU's common private law.
Against a European Civil Code
I propose to heed Nietzsche's advice: 'Handle deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out of them.'2 The 'deep problem' I wish to address here concerns European legal integration. Specifically, I want to consider a propoundment which is apparently meeting with increasing favour in various political, professional and academic circles: that of a European Civil Code.3 The paradox is noteworthy: while nineteenth-century civil codes ruptured aspects of the commonality that had previously linked continental legal cultures, a civil code, it is now thought by many, will cement a legal unity across European legal cultures. The question is: should the idea of a European Civil Code be supported? My answer is, emphatically: no, it should not. I have divided my argument into three parts.
The Social Evaluation of Intergenerational Policies and Its Application to Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change
Abstract Assessment of climate change policies requires aggregation of costs and benefits over time and across generations, a process ordinarily done through discounting. Choosing the correct discount rate has proved to be controversial and highly consequential. To clarify past analysis and guide future work, we decompose discounting along two dimensions. First, we distinguish discounting by individuals, an empirical matter that determines their behavior in models, and discounting by an outside evaluator, an ethical matter involving the choice of a social welfare function. Second, for each type of discounting, we distinguish it due to pure time preference from that attributable to curvature of the pertinent function: utility functions (of consumption) for individuals and the social welfare function (of utilities) for the evaluator. We apply our analysis to leading integrated assessment models used to evaluate climate policies. We find that past work often confounds different sources of discounting, and we offer suggestions for avoiding these difficulties. Finally, we relate the standard intergenerational framework that combines considerations of efficiency and distribution to more familiar modes of analysis that assess most policies in terms of efficiency, leaving distributive concerns to the tax and transfer system.