THE UNITY OF PRIVATE LAW, PART OF THE REFORM ORGANIZED BY THE 2009 CIVIL CODE
THE UNITY OF PRIVATE LAW, PART OF THE REFORM ORGANIZED BY THE 2009 CIVIL CODE

Summary/Abstract: The 2009 Civil Code reformed almost all the institutions of civil law: marriage, matrimonial regime, contract, obligations, etc. It also unified the two branches of private law that existed in the era before its adoption, civil law and commercial law. Technically, the unification was carried out mainly by taking over the rules of the law of obligations from the Commercial Code 1887 and integrating them into the law of obligations from the Civil Code, some of these rules being merged into civil law, intended to be applied to both professionals and nonprofessionals, others subordinating exclusively the legal relations of professionals. The resulting body of rules constitutes the monistic system of private law. The 2009 Civil Code is a common law of all private legal relations, without distinguishing between those of civil law and commercial law in the classical sense, leaving the role of developing (completing, derogating, adapting) the categories of private law legal relations, organized in the Civil Code as common law, to special laws. Through this technique of regulating private law relations, there is no longer a division between civil law and commercial law, but a common law of the various categories of legal relations under civil law. The monism of private law is announced by art. 2-3 of the Civil Code. In the first, the object of the Civil Code is enshrined, "(...) the patrimonial relations (...) between the subjects of civil law" its rules constitute "the common law for all areas to which the letter or spirit of its provisions refers" (paragraph 2). In art. 3, the novelty brought by the 2009 Civil Code regarding the monism of private law is enshrined, providing that not only the civil relations of the subjects of civil law in the classical sense are subordinated to it, but also those of professionals, moreprecisely, "(...) the relations between them and any other subjects of civil law". The current state of economic development, the socio-economic order of consumerism, electronic commerce, the performance of economic activities by a wide category of legal entities, not only those qualified as traders in the classical sense, the imprecision of the subjective and objective criteria used by the Commercial Code 1887 in qualifying the commercial or civil nature of a legal relationship, constitute the determining reasons for the shown reform of civil law. The shown reform of private law also consists in expanding the categories of legal subjects classified as professionals, including, in addition to traders in the classical sense, legal subjects who perform economic activities organized in enterprises, regardless of whether they have a profit-making purpose or not.

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