international Law
Interview mit Dr. Gerrit de Geest
Why is your course essential for an MBA-Student?
The Idea is - if you want to do business, if you are an entrepreneur or a manager in a company - you should know more than the law of your country.
A long time ago, when you were a manager in Austria, all you needed to know was the Austrian law. It was the time of the national state – so you lived in one big state, e.g. Germany, France and that was really the universe for you. But in a modern world, we live in an international world and this course basically teaches you about different legal systems. In this sense it is a course what you call “comparative law”. “Comparative Law” means that we compare the laws of many different countries.
Just European Countries?
No, I’m extremely broad and I also pay attention to American law because I am teaching US-Law at my University in the US. But we also discuss Chinese Law, Japanese Law, Taiwanese Law, a little bit Russian Law and of course Latin American Law. I try to make it as broad as possible, although we go into detail. On the one hand I give various examples of the differences, but we focus mostly in-depth on French Law, German Law, English Law and US-Law. These are the systems that get the most attention.
Why do these systems get the most attention?
French and German law are basically “law” families. If you look at the type of legal systems that you have, French law is one big family and German is the other one. The German family maybe comprises 20-30 countries. For instance, if you look at the Japanese law, it’s largely German law.
So in this sense, if you look at Chinese law it is German law although they have taken over also many elements of French Law and American law. If you look at Latin American countries it is largely French law at least in the French-Spanish family it is mainly the same – Spanish law is actually largely French Law.
Why is Japan following the German Law?
This is an historic coincidence. At the end of the 19th century, they wanted to modernize completely, because they felt the competition of the Western nations and felt humiliated by them and were scared that they would become a colony.
They wanted to modernize the country immediately and so they wanted to have the most recent law - the newest of the new. The French law, the French Codes were from the year 1804, the time of Napoleon. End of 19th century the Germans were preparing their codes and the Japanese wanted to the have the most modern Codes – and the German system was the most recent Law.
Amazingly Japan introduced the German Codes before Germany itself. A couple years before the Civil Code was introduced in Germany, it was introduced in Japan.
There they were focused on the latest inventions, not only technology, but also law. They sent over a lot of people to Germany to study there and that may have contributed to the military cooperation in the 1940’s. As we know, Japan conquered China and Korea and occupied these countries. They made the German law system mandatory there. So Korean Law became German Law. This historical coincidence is the reason why we find so much German Law in Asia.
What about the Anglo-Saxon system? Is it totally different from the big law families (French and German)?
The German system is between the French and the Anglo-Saxon System. In the Anglo-Saxon-System, judges mainly make the laws. It is a system with a very open argumentation. The judges really say what is good about a rule and what is weak – in some sense they are politicians. As a result I think, American and English Law are very good. If you look at the legal innovation – all the legal innovation of the recent times came from the US. Comparing the origin of the last 100 new ideas in Law, 99 came from the US. It is that open way of talking about law that leads to this.
What do you think about EU at the moment (October 2011)?
I think it is slowly developing into a separate legal system. The problem is that the European Union in theory cannot say anything about contract law, property law or accident law because it is limited to certain issues like competition, but slowly European contract law is developing. More and more you see now courses on European contract law and I think over time we are developing towards an European contract law.
What are the weaknesses of the “European Law” at the moment?
I personally am in favour on “European Law” – that’s of course my personal opinion. As I’m originating from a small country (Belgium) and now live in a huge country (US), I can compare the systems, and I think that the quality of law is lower in Belgium than in the US.
That’s logical, because Belgium is a small country, there are few experts and therefore less expertise and less innovation. In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense to have more experts.
Due to the EU, Belgium would have access to experts of about 400 m people in the EU. Therefore I’m in favour of this development – not because only of the EU but because of the Economies of Scale. A lot of people are very emotional about this.
They see law as a matter of culture and those in Brussels shouldn’t influence so much. But I think this approach is not the best for business. In my experience, business profits from law that is very professional, very predictable and I think EU should develop this level of law quality all over the EU.
November 2011