The recodification of private law in central and eastern Europe

In the past two decades, Central and Eastern European countries have experienced a rapid political, economic and social transformation. This transformation has been intertwined with the Europeanisation and modernisation of the law. This chapter analyses the different paths of the renewal of private law in Central and Eastern Europe, with or without recodification, with a special emphasis on the ongoing drafting process of the new civil code in Hungary. The role of top-down harmonisation of national law with European directives, the conflicts between academic and political as well as between material and symbolic interests in the drafting process are discussed. The chapter also identifies how mechanisms of legal transplantation, legal technical assistance, regulatory competition and legal emulation impact on the structure and substance of new codes in the region