The Main Directives of the Process of Unification Commercial Contracts Law in Europe – The Path for Serbian National Private Law Legislation
International character of economic relations is in discrepancy with the limitation of their national legislation. During the whole last century and especially since World War II enormous grow of international trade created inevitable need for attempts of harmonization and even unification of commercial contract law. The unknown law of the different countries and contradictions and discrepancies among the legal families of common and civil law were the big risk which increased enormously transactional costs of the business arrangements in the trade between nations, especially in the trade among European countries. Existed varieties of contract law in European countries become a special type of non-tariff barrier which opposed to the free flow of goods, services, persons and capital and at the end decreased wealth. Legal scholars, practitioners and lawyers in Europe realized the need for harmonizing contract law in a way to create and adopt uniform rules for commercial activities, in one word to Europeanize the law of commercial contracts and create uniform legal environments. The problem of appropriate method of the unification divides many academics between idea of codification method in the way of legislation or by so called “creeping” method which uses common customs and practices in order to create unified system of generally accepted principles of commercial contracts law (lex mercatoria). In spite the first stages of unification was realized by way of directives, such as the law of consumer contracts, later on creation of the body of European competition law, emanation of the idea of Europeanized contract law took another direction emanating itself through the legal instrument of the so called “soft law” such as Principles of European Contract Law (PECL) created by the Commission of European Contract Law (so called Lando Commission). The Lando Principles which in their 17 Chapters content the common core of the all national legal systems of European countries are nowadays regarded as the nucleus of a European Civil Code. In Serbian attempts to join the EU it is the process of Europeanizing its commercial contract law which creating a challenge which obstacles should be overcome thankfully to the healthy roots of Serbian Law of Obligations-de lege lata which is the best part of Serbian positive private law founded on European legal tradition.