Economic integration within Europe has led to a growing interest in the various national legal systems within the European Union and the European Economic Area. This is caused, first of all, by intensifying business relations and cross-border transactions. If, to give but one example, the buyer of a time-share in Spain lives in France where the buyer has his main domicile, it might very well be that Spanish law applies to the sales agreement and most certainly Spanish law will apply to the acquisition of the time-share. It has to be taken into account that there are around 1.5 million foreign property owners in Spain, which is among Europe’s favourite countries for second homes. Interest in the various national legal systems is also growing, because of the growing impact that European law has on the law of the member states of the European Union. Developments have even gone so far that work has started on a “Common Frame of Reference”, aimed at systematising the existing acquis communautaire and at the same aimed at creating a common fund of concepts, definitions and rules upon which further European private law can be based. To prepare such a Common Frame of Reference extensive comparative research is being done to discover if in a given legal area a common core of European private law exists or whether important differences exist.
The result is growing interest from foreign lawyers in the other national legal systems. In various countries this has led to general introductory books, frequently written in English. An example is the book edited by Ewoud Hondius, Introduction to Dutch Law, published under the auspices of the Netherlands Comparative Law Association. For Spanish law such an introduction did not exist yet. This book is aimed to fill that gap in the area of private law (law of obligations and law of property). A group of authors has written the various chapters, based upon their expert knowledge in a particular area. To introduce Spanish patrimonial law to the foreign reader an introductory chapter was written, explaining the layered structure of Spanish private law. Spain is a plurilegislative state, characterised by legal diversity. It is from this plurilegislative aspect that the study of Spanish private law is so fascinating for the non-Spanish lawyer. It presents a possible model for the further development of private law within the European Union or perhaps also other groups of countries of which the economies are being integrated. The role of the old European “ius commune” (the law developed by learned authors as they studied Roman law and who tried to apply this system of law to the needs of their time) is especially interesting, even more as the Spanish Civil Code not only replaced the “ius commune” from a formal viewpoint, but also took over its role as overarching and sometimes subsidiary source of law.
The study of Spanish private law is, however, not only interesting from this historical and methodological viewpoint. Spanish law has developed into a modern legal system, in which, e.g., ownership is being given special constitutional protection. To give another example from the area of property law: Spanish law has developed a right of time-share, which is a new form of ownership on the borderline of contract and property.
We express our enormous gratitude to the authors who were willing to spend so much of their time on this book. It is already difficult enough to explain in a concise way a particular legal area to an audience of interested lawyers, but it is even more difficult if this has to be done in English. Although English is now widely used by comparative lawyers, it is a complicated and sometimes misleading language for civil lawyers. Civilian concepts are difficult to translate into legal English, which, it goes without saying, is the expression of English (and American) law and not of the civil law.
Our gratitude extends to Andrés M. Cosialls, Núria Cucurull, Rosa Miquel, Maria Rivera, and Almudena Rosich, for their assistance in editing the book, and to Brian Storan, for linguistic revision of the chapters.
Finally, we can only hope that this book fulfils the aim of giving introductory information on Spanish patrimonial law to a foreign audience.