Heinz Kötz, Europäisches Vertragsrecht
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Pages | 317-319 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2018.0494 |
| Author | |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
A book on European contract law may be compared to a book on American contract law: books about subjects that exist only in the pages of academic text. Neither reflects a system of law applied by national or state courts. And yet it is the work of the pre-eminent scholars in these fields, whether Professor Kötz or Professor Farnsworth, that often contains more insight than works focussed on a single national system. In the world of European private law, the name of Professor Kötz is a kite-mark of quality. The publication of the first edition of Hein Kötz's peerless book in 1996 marked an epoch in the development of European private law. The success of the original may be due, in part, to Kötz's rare ability to present incisive commentary, reflecting exceptional labour, in highly readable German prose; and perhaps also in part due to his most fruitful collaboration with the inimitable intellectual and stylistic powers of the late Tony Weir for the purposes of presenting his scholarship to the English-speaking world. Indeed, this dilatory review has now been overtaken by the publication of the second edition in English, by Oxford University Press, of
The very title of the German book was itself a challenge to orthodoxy. For until Kötz's follow-up book dealing with domestic German contract law in 2009 –
In conception, Kötz's book was to be the first of two volumes; the second, by Axel Flessner, was to cover performance...
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