The Catala Working Group on the Reform of French Law of Obligations

The Catala Working Group is a group of scholars sponsored by the Association Henri Capitant and headed by Professor Emiritus Pierre Catala which has undertaken the reform of Title III of Book III of the French Civil Code (Of Contracts and Conventional Obligations in General). This working group of approximately 34 law professors produced a revision of the law of obligations (articles 1101 to 1386 of the Civl Code) and prescription (articles 2234 to 2281 of the Civil Code) which has been officially presented to the French government. The original text of the revisions, in French, is available here, as well as the translations in English (by LSU’s Professor Alain Levasseur), Spanish (by Chancellor Fernando Hinestrosa), Italian and German (by Professor Hans. J. Sonnenberger).

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The Big German Book (BGB) - in English

A while back, the German Ministry of Justice put out an official translation in English of the German Civil Code based on the version promulgated on 02 Jan. 2002. They pulled this translation from the net shortly after publishing due to flaws in the translation (click here for the Ministry's translation page). I thought it was gone forever but I was able to find that the University of Edinburgh School of Law has a copy of the translation posted here. While it is not an "official" translation it can at least help researchers unfamiliar with German.

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ALEX - The Austrian Law Digitization Project

ALEX is the Austrian National Library's ongoing project of digitization of Austrian legal materials. This project's database consists of pdf files of historical Austrian legal materials in some cases going as far back as the XVIII century. Since these are scans of the original documents, all the materials are in German and there are not any translations contained in the database. However, this will be a great resource to any researcher working in Austrian law.

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Foreign Law Translations - France, Germany, Israel & Austria

The University of Texas at Austin School of Law has a site at the Institute of Trasnational Law dedicated to provide translations of French, German, Israeli, and Austrian materials. The French and German sites are subdivided into legislation and decision areas while the Israeli and Austrian sites only hold decisions... While the German site has many dead links, it still provides acces to translated sections of the German Civil Code, the official site for which was recently pulled because of translation problems. For a more comprehensive collection of translated German materials, check the German Law Archive. This Archive was started by the University of Oxford and it is presently on its own domain, iuscomp.org, which also hosts the Oxford University Comparative Law Forum and the website of the Institute of European and Comparative Law of the University of Oxford.

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Civil Law Dictionary Wiki

I have begun a Civil Law Dictonary Wiki Project in which I hope to include Civil Law/Common Law glossaries listing and defining those Civil Law terms unfamiliar to Common Law practitioners. This wiki is intended to be a collaborative project in which anyone can contribute. It is indented to be a work in progress to which users can add material or edit the entries already there. If you would like to participate, please, contact me at vicenc.feliu@law.lsu.edu for access to the project.

Thanks in advance for your collaboration.

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