GOOD FAITH AND LEGAL UNIFICATION
GOOD FAITH AND LEGAL UNIFICATION

Summary/Abstract: One of the main questions of the unification of European Contract Law is the problem of Good Faith. In the Continental legal systems it is quite obvious handling the principle of good faith as the most important element of the contractual relations, the legal order and the structure of the law. On contrary, this is not so evident on the other side of the channel. In England and the so called Common Law regimes the good faith is some kind of strange idol, which is not to be accepted and not to be recognized as one of the most necessary element of the legal system. That kind of antagonism has led to a number of serious debates regarding the unification process and the formation of the different point of views about the future shape and outlines of the European private law including the unified contract law. The process of unification of laws in Europe has been carried out for decades and has not been finished yet. For a long time the European Institutions – mostly the Commission and the Council – only made a piecemeal harmonization of the contract laws of the European Union. The situation, however, changed after the meeting of the European Council in Tampere in 1999, namely, the Commission started to act.1 In the recent years an enormous activity has been carried out on the field of European contract law. Since 2001 not only the official organs of the European Union but also private initiatives have shown particular interest in the topic, namely how and by what means the fragmented European legal regulations can be harmonized, why it shall be actually done and how the desired outcome can be reached. The current and dominant point of view of the European organs is behind an optional, harmonizing instrument of soft law character, which can be accepted by all the Member States (that means the politics) and the representatives of the economic sectors, respectively. This is a frequently disputed concept since the major part of the science is not convinced of the usefulness of a mere optional instrument.2 The debates will last long; consequently, no compromise might be reached in the near future. The main aspects of the present paper are the meaning of good faith, its application in the different legal systems and its possible regulation by the expected compilations.

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