Legal-Technical, Social and Political Objectives of The Codification of Legislation

Abstract

This article analyses the objectives of the codification of legislation on the basis of the scholarly views of foreign jurists, treating them as a system of three interrelated dimensions — legal-technical, social and political. The legal-technical dimension is disclosed through the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, Konrad Zweigert, Hein Kötz and Alan Watson, and encompasses the systematic arrangement of legal material, the unification of legal terminology, the elimination of internal contradictions, and the technique of transferring and adapting legal institutions. The social dimension is examined on the basis of the works of Roscoe Pound, Gustav Radbruch, H. Patrick Glenn, Gunther Teubner and René David, in which codification appears as an instrument of legal certainty, social stability, the institutionalization of a society’s self-understanding, and legal education. The political dimension is revealed through the views of John Austin, Jean-Louis Bergel, Franz Wieacker and Peter Stein, where codification is interpreted as a means of centralizing state power, consolidating national unity and securing the internal and external legitimacy of the state. Separate attention is devoted to the historical formation of the idea of codification, to the doctrines of Ihering, Kelsen, Hart, Weber and Luhmann, and to such contemporary tendencies as decodification, recodification and the discussion surrounding a European civil code. The author concludes that an approach confined to the legal-technical aspect alone is incapable of revealing the full essence of codification, and that the task of the codifier consists in attaining a balance among the three groups of objectives.