It will soon be two hundred years since Napoleon, as First Consul, appointed four not especially distinguished lawyers to sit down and codify the entire heterogeneous mass of French civil law. They were appointed in August 1800 and by February 1801 had produced and published a complete draft of the Civil Code. After taking the views of the judges and the Tribunal, Napoleon chaired nearly half of the 123 subsequent redrafting sessions of the Conseil d'Etat, some lasting from noon to dawn, repeatedly insisting that detailed prescriptions would be self-defeating; that the right method was to set out the goals the courts were to achieve. By the spring of 1804 the whole project was law. The fresh codification now under way under the great conseiller Braibant is the task of a decade where Bonaparte's commissioners took little more than four months. In Hong Kong yet worse has happened: an attempt in the best colonial tradition of demented heroism to codify the English common law in Chinese (something nobody has yet done in English) in time for the handover in 1997 has foundered on problems of translation. Initial worries about the Mandarin equivalent of issue estoppel and certiorari were overtaken by the catastrophic rendering of barrister and solicitor as 'big lawyer' and 'little lawyer' respectively, giving lasting offence to Hong Kong's solicitors and bringing the project ultimately to a standstill.

LRB 28 November 1996 | PDF Download