REPORT OF THE SECRETARY GENERAL (2)

This report is meant to summarize the activities of the International Academy of Comparative Law during the period between the XVIIth International Congress of Comparative Law held at Utrecht/The Netherlands, in July 2006, and the XVIIIth Congress held in Washington D.C. in July 2010. During that period the Executive Committee of the Academy was composed of Professor George Bermann as its president, Professors Allan Brewer Carías, Bénédicte Fauvarque Cosson, and Attila Hármathy as vice presidents representing Latin America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe, Professor Xavier Blanc-Jouvan as treasurer, and Professor Jürgen Basedow as secretary general. The Executive Committee appointed Dr. Katrin Deckert as deputy secretary general. The report focuses on 5 points: (1) Revision of byelaws and statutes; (2) National committees; (3) Financial situation of the Academy; (4) Further congresses; (5) Publication of our work.

Given the longstanding cooperation of the Academy with the Paris Institute of Comparative Law, the French Society of Comparative Law and the French Center of Comparative Law, the Executive Committee decided to keep its secretariat at the traditional address at 28, rue Saint Guillaume, Paris. This stability of location is an advantage to our members and it is facilitated by the fact that our president regularly teaches at Paris and that two members of the Executive Committee as well as the deputy secretary general are domiciled there.

2.

Throughout the four-year term, the work of the Executive Committee has focused on a revision of the byelaws and the statutes. The observation underlying that revision has been that the restrictions of the right of nomination practiced in the past were adequate at a time when comparatists formed a rather small sub-group of legal scholars dealing with general aspects of legal systems and with the comparative method. Throughout the last 30 or 40 years, comparative law has changed its character and functions, however. The study of general issues of comparative law still is a core element of the discipline. However, legal scholars specializing in many areas of the law have included comparative investigations in their research design. As a consequence, scholars engaged in excellent comparative research in specific fields such as antitrust, the law of genetic research, or the combat against organized crime, working in separate areas of scholarship, do not know each other anymore.

Restricting the right to nominate candidates for election to the Academy to a very small group of people thus leads to a narrow intellectual limitation of the Academy itself. If the Academy wants to represent comparative legal scholarship in all areas of the law, it has to allow nominations for membership from a much larger group of people. Consequently, the extension of the right to nominate new members has been a major concern.

A second basic policy orientation of the outgoing Executive Committee is the globalization of the Academy. The Academy’s work has traditionally focused on European countries and North America. Due to the limited ability to read non-European languages and to personal connections, nominators have often limited their proposals for new members to candidates from Europe and North America. One possible way of winning new members from other parts of the world appears to be the broadening of the right of nomination. After the 2007 revision of the byelaws, the secretariat has in fact received nominations from single members from all over the world, and we do hope that this trend will continue. As a result of a growing number of nominations the Academy currently has about 570 members.

The revision of the byelaws was possible through the sole approval of amendments by the Executive Committee. But of course, this revision had to respect the statutes. Further amendments which appear desirable to the Executive Committee will need an amendment of the statutes and will be discussed as a separate point of the agenda.

3.

A matter of concern for the Executive Committee has been the operation of the national committees. In 2006, the number of national committees was rather limited, many legal systems not being represented within the Academy at all. Moreover, many of the existing national committees were simply inoperative. This means in practice that requests by the secretariat for the nomination of candidates for membership or of national reporters for the congresses simply remained without an answer. Such passivity curtails the working capacity of the Academy and often deprives scholars interested in comparative law in the respective countries from cooperating through the channels of the Academy.

The Executive Committee has embarked upon two strategies to improve the situation. It wrote letters to inactive national committees asking for the reasons and suggesting the appointment of new or additional members of the respective national committee in order to reactivate its cooperation with the secretariat. This turned out to be successful in some cases where we learnt that the head of the national committee had retired long ago without however feeling the need for handing over responsibility to younger colleagues.

A second line of action of the outgoing Executive Committee has been the recruitment of new national committees. The approval of more than 20 additional committees throughout the last four years gives evidence of the success of our efforts. Sometimes that approval requires diplomatic caution because the applications did not only come from bodies representing comparative legal scholarship of a whole nation, but also that of sub-units such as Quebec, Taiwan, Scotland, Hong Kong or Macao. In these cases, the Executive Committee decided to approve the respective committees because of the far-reaching autonomy of the respective jurisdictions. From a scholarly point of view which is decisive for an academy, these jurisdictions are as interesting as many other independent nations.

I would like to grasp the opportunity of this report to remind members of the important role their respective committee plays as an intermediary between the secretariat of the Academy and single comparative law scholars in their countries. The organization of a comparative conference that provides a broad survey of the law in different parts of the world to a very large extent depends on the active cooperation of national committees. While general reporters sometimes have a global network of contacts and might even prefer to recruit national reporters themselves, this is by no means ensured in all fields of law. In order to comply with this demand for cooperation, national committees which sometimes consist of a single scholar should consider co-opting further scholars that have a broader knowledge of additional areas of the law and of scholars specializing in those areas.

4.

The financial situation of the Academy will be covered by the treasurer’s report. But I would like to make some general remarks. Before I took over the office of the secretary general, an American colleague told me that he was convinced that the Academy is rich. When I had a better insight after my election, I found out that there were some funds indeed, but that the revenues of the Academy did not suffice to meet the running costs such as the salary of the deputy secretary general and the travel costs of the members of the Executive Committee. Academics are reluctant to talk about money, but believe me, it is necessary.

We raised the annual dues to € 50.00 or US$ 70.00, but we had to realize that only a bit more than 50 per cent of all members regularly pay their annual fee. Given the additional revenue the Academy generates from its congresses, we are currently close to a break-even point of our running costs which we are still unable to cover fully, however. Members who have not paid their annual dues in spite of repeated reminders from our side have therefore recently received a harsh letter facing them with the options to either pay their dues for the last three years or to leave the Academy. While this is not the usual tone in academic circles, we consider it as inevitable after several years of default and unsuccessful reminders. Members are certainly aware of the time spent by the Executive Committee on the affairs of the Academy. They should also consider that this commitment requires a sound financial basis.

Our endeavors to achieve this goal include the raising of revenues from the congresses of the Academy. A share of about 100 $ of the registration fee of the Washington Congress will in fact benefit the Academy’s budget. This has been criticized by a letter we received from the Japanese national committee before the Congress pointing out that this would turn the Congress into an exclusive event for well-to-do people. Let me focus on this point for a moment. I guess that many of us would prefer to grant free access to the sessions and debates of the Academy, in particular to students and scholars from less privileged countries. Under the present circumstances, however, we must impose registration charges for the costs of the Congress and we must ensure a certain flow of income for the Academy from such an event, since the costs of the Executive Committee cannot be borne by the annual dues of the Academy members exclusively. Since the Academy’s share of the registration fee is fairly small it is most likely irrelevant for the decision to attend or not to attend. Anyway we are forced to look for other sources of revenue.

It is this objective that makes us suggest an amendment to the statutes which allows for the admission of non-voting corporate members such as universities or law firms. I would very much urge you to think about potential corporate members to be recruited in your respective countries. Our objective should be to improve the financial basis of the Academy to a point where we could grant travel awards and invite scholars from less wealthy nations who would like to attend a comparative law congress but who are unable to raise the funds at home that are needed for such a congress. I may also refer in this context to the very successful efforts made by the deputy secretary general to lower our running costs by making new cooperation agreements with the French Society of Comparative Law.

5.

A further innovation of the current four-year term was the organization of an intermediate congress in Mexico City in 2008. It was clearly distinguished from the international congresses by two factors: It was a short congress, lasting only two and a half days, and it was devoted to a single overarching theme, namely the impact of uniform law on national legal systems. Our member Jorge Sánchez Cordero who headed the Mexican organization committee did a wonderful job and set a standard for future thematic congresses of this kind.

The new format of the intermediate thematic congress will render the Academy more frequently visible to legal scholarship at large. Moreover, it will allow the Academy to present itself in more numerous parts of the world including countries that would refrain from hosting a full-fledged international congress of one week’s duration. A third advantage of the new format is its thematic focus. In order to attract scholars from all areas of the law, general themes will be chosen which remind us of some fundamental issues and notions of our discipline which often fall into oblivion in an era of progressive specialization of the law. These advantages are worth the increased amount of administrative work for the Secretariat which however sometimes poses problems to the limited capacities of a body that is run to a large extent by volunteers and their initiative.

In this context, I have the pleasure to announce the next thematic congress of the Academy which will be organized by the committee of Taiwan from May 24 to 26, 2012. It will deal with the general theme of codification which is particularly timely in East Asia, but also receives renewed attention in many countries of the former Soviet bloc, in the European Union and in Latin America. The congress will be organized under the auspices of the College of Law at the National Taiwan University and will be the first congress of the Academy in East Asia. I would like thank our colleagues from Taiwan, in particular Professor Wen Yeu Wang, for taking the initiative and I do hope for the attendance of many Academy members.

While it is too early to make any precise plans for future thematic congresses, I would like to let you know that the Executive Committee tends to go on with this format. We therefore invite those of you who have shown some interest in hosting the thematic congress of 2016 to send us proposals in writing for further deliberations in the Executive Committee.

Let me conclude this part of my report by referring you to the XIXth International Congress of Comparative Law. After an intense and productive exchange of views with the Austrian committee, the 2014 congress has been allotted to Vienna which has been known as a hospitable city for centuries. The choice of this city is linked to the expectation that the congress will attract many comparative legal scholars especially from Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe where comparative law has had a great renaissance in recent years. The dates of the congress have not yet been finalised, but it will most likely be held in the third week of July 2014, i.e. from 20 to 27 July. When preparing that Congress we shall have to think about the structure of the program again. The critique of the Japanese national committee mentioned before also points to the overburdened program of the International Congresses of Comparative Law and suggests to shorten the list of topics eliminating in particular all subjects related to the unification or harmonization of laws. I wonder how you think about this proposal. Of course, any other comments on the Washington Congress are welcome. In particular, we urge you to make proposals for the improvement of the program.

6.

My final point concerns the publications of our work. It goes without saying that the national reports and general reports to the international congresses of comparative law and to the thematic congresses should be made accessible to future researchers. This requires publication of those reports which have a publishable quality. Publication may also serve other purposes: Present and future scholars will get an impression of the style of academic work and the subjects deemed important in the year 2010 when they review a book containing the general reports of the Washington Congress. The ministries of justice all over the world may get an impression of current developments and tendencies in the fields of the various sections of the congress. Others may be interested in the state of legal scholarship in a given country or in information provided in the two official languages of the Academy on the law of a specific  country where a third language is the official one.

The different interests have brought about, over the years, three different types of publication of congress reports:

(1)               a book containing all general reports edited by the local organizing committee;

(2)               thematic books comprising the general report and the various national reports of a given section edited by the general reporters; and

(3)               collections of national reports of a given country, either in a law review or in a book of collected papers; such publications are prepared within the single countries, usually by the national associations of comparative law.

The three types of publication by necessity overlap: General reports are published in books of the first and second type, and national reports are published in publications of the second and third type. In the past, the publishers have usually accepted such double publication because the groups of purchasers differ very much in accordance with the divergent interests outlined above. We should try to maintain this triad of publications for the reasons set forth above: The potential purchasers and readers belong to very different groups. This means that both national and general reporters should avoid transferring exclusive copyright to any publisher.

Next to the publication in paper the electronic publication is an option for the future. It may be less expensive and generate less difficulty in many respects; moreover, it may also be easier to be retraced by electronic research at a later stage. But we urge all general reporters who have not yet taken steps to publish the thematic volume of their respective session to do so in the near future. The thematic publications will be the most important ones for future research.

Let me conclude by a short review of the past week. We have been hosted by a consortium of three law schools acting on behalf of the American Society of Comparative Law, and I guess that the three schools usually consider each other as competitors and not as cooperation partners. It is the more remarkable that the three schools succeeded to put up a most stimulating academic and social program. We could attend a large number of discussions in the various sections and additional lectures and panel discussions covering many areas of the law, and I guess that many of us grasped the opportunity to take a look inside areas of the law which are less familiar to us and perhaps even to get inspiration from those areas.

Knowing a little bit about the long time of preparation and the great number of complicated issues in the organization of such a congress, I would like to convey my deep gratitude and high appreciation for those who took upon themselves this heavy burden and who mastered the task in an admirable way: I am talking about Karen Brown and Susan Karamanian from George Washington University, Jim Feinerman and Franz Werro from Georgetown University, and Fernanda Nicola and David Snyder from American University. Members of the organization committee from other US universities were our president George Bermann from Columbia University and Mathias Reimann from the University of Michigan. Having been in almost permanent contact with the committee and in particular with David Snyder I know about the numerous questions that had to be answered and problems that had to be solved. Thank you all very much for this great congress which we shall keep in best memory!

With this expression of my gratitude I would like to conclude, hoping to see you again at Taiwan in May 2012.

Jürgen Basedow, Hamburg